On Discipline

Tokyo, Japan. This is kind of like a "Park and Ride" for people who commute on bikes and then take the Metro.

Perhaps it is because of my former training as a pianist, I have been able to enlist Discipline to help cope with stressful situations. There were two main events in my life that have precipitated me to establish a regimented routine of some sort: my degree recital during my senior year at Michigan and my Ph.D. exams (known as "Generals") at Harvard. 

For the recital, I prepped for about one school year. I forced myself to get to the Music School every day at 9:00 AM (NOT easy for a night owl like me), practice for three hours, have a bagel and coffee, go to class, take the Blue Bus to central campus, have dinner at home, drive back to the Music School by 7:00 PM to ensure I got a piano for the rest of the evening, practice, and go home at 11:00 PM or so. 

For Generals, there was a much shorter prep time...basically, two and a half crazy-intense months during the summer of 2007. After a trip to Seoul at the beginning of the summer, I returned to Cambridge and literally started hitting the books. My basic schedule also involved getting to the Music Department by 9:15 AM, reading & taking notes in the office, eating lunch in the lounge with fellow exam-takers, moving into the Seeger Room of the Loeb Music Library in the afternoon, checking out books before 5:00 PM, working out at the Law School gym (only twice a week), having dinner, and then "winding down" by watching some kind of ethnographic film. Nine out of ten films viewed, however, had some kind of graphic animal sacrifice scene - so unfortunately, the calming effect was not quite achieved, and I had to turn to something like E! ("Top Ten Hollywood Break-ups") or Bravo (Project Runway - the best show ever).

In thinking about both "challenges," I was able to maintain this rigid schedule out of one primary motivating factor: fear. Fear of starting a Beethoven sonata and then having a memory slip and not being able to get back on. Fear of not really having the technical chops to play certain passages in the Debussy Preludes. Or: Intense fear of being faced with an exam question I had no idea how to answer. More intense fear of being asked a question at orals and then revealing my obtuseness. 

Fortunately, both the recital and the exams went better than I expected. I survived.

A few weeks back, a friend sent over the following article on "defensive pessimism," which I think has my name hyperlinked all over it. That, in addition to being a perfectionist, I think, explains a lot about how I prepare for big, stressful events.

Recently, I realized that fear is starting to set in again...can I finish in time? Will I have enough data? Am I doing enough? Am I asking the right questions? Am I meeting the right people? Can I actually write this dissertation when I go back?

I seek Discipline now in these final months - but it seems that the unwieldiness of fieldwork and the flexible nature of "Korean time" resists a fixed routine that I can take feigned solace in. And unlike the delimited block of time with a singular event circled in red at the end of it, I see not one postlude to fieldwork, but many significant developmental stages: departure, re-entry, adjustment, transcription, research, teaching, and the Writing.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. I guess, for now, it's just one day at a time.