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The baby whale was swimming right beside me, so full of energy, speeding ahead, circling back, and bounding through the water with great exuberance. He turned and swam right under me, so close I could almost reach out and touch him. He seemed happy. He seemed to be playing and full of energy, but how long could that last? When had he last eaten? How long would his body fat sustain him? How often did he need to drink so he didn’t get dehydrated? What would we do if we couldn’t find his mother? I didn’t have any answers. But as long as we tried, as long as we kept looking, there was a chance we could find her. Sometimes it’s the process of doing that makes things clear. If we don’t start, we never know what could have been. Sometimes the answers we find while searching are better or more creative than anything we could ever have imagined before.
Don’t assume the need for practice privacy will go away the better you get. Consider what the great composer Igor Stravinsky wrote in his autobiography: My family and I were quartered in a hotel in which it was impossible for me to compose. I was anxious, therefore, to find a piano some place where I could work in peace. I have never been able to compose unless sure that no one could hear me. A music dealer...provided me with a sort of lumber room full of empty Chocolat Suchard packing cases, which opened on to a chicken run.2 That practice room wasn’t quite what Stravinsky was looking for, and he soon found another that suited him. Keep looking for a practice space that works for you. The benefit of a shed of your own is that you get to explore sound without annoying anybody or feeling self-conscious. No matter how good you get, the exploration of sound is endless. Aural privacy will help you explore sound more thoroughly, and will save others from having to participate in your explorations.
The Practice of Practice
Jonathan Harnum
For Wilbur and Orville the dream had taken hold. The works of Lilienthal and Mouillard, the brothers would attest, had “infected us with their own unquenchable enthusiasm and transformed idle curiosity into the active zeal of workers.” They would design and build their own experimental glider-kite, drawing on much they had read, much they had observed about birds in flight, and, importantly, from considerable time thinking. They had made themselves familiar with the language of aeronautics, the terms used in explaining the numerous factors involved in attaining “equilibrium” or balance in flight, where balance was quite as crucial as in riding a bicycle. Lift came from air moving faster over the arched top of a wing, thereby making the pressure there less than that under the wing. Pitch was the tilt of the flying machine, front and back, nose down, nose up. Roll applied to the rotation of the wing, up or down on one side or the other, like a boat rocking. Yaw applied to the direction of the flight, the turning of the plane pointing the nose left or right. Equilibrium was the all-important factor, the brothers understood. The difficulty was not to get into the air but to stay there, and they concluded that Lilienthal’s fatal problem had been an insufficient means of control—“his inability to properly balance his machine in the air,” as Orville wrote. Swinging one’s legs or shifting the weight of one’s body about in midair were hardly enough. Wilbur’s observations of birds in flight had convinced him that birds used more “positive and energetic methods of regaining equilibrium” than that of a pilot trying to shift the center of gravity with his own body. It had occurred to him that a bird adjusted the tips of its wings so as to present the tip of one wing at a raised angle, the other at a lowered angle. Thus its balance was controlled by “utilizing dynamic reactions of the air instead of shifting weight.” The chief need was skill rather than machinery. It was impossible to fly without both knowledge and skill—of this Wilbur was already certain—and skill came only from experience—experience in the air. He calculated that in the five years Lilienthal had devoted to gliders and gliding, he spent a total of only five hours in actual flight. It was hardly enough and not how he and Orville would proceed.
The Wright Brothers
David McCullough
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