Recharging your batteries

 

When the great pianist Josef Hofmann was asked whether it was advisable to take a month’s rest from practicing during the Christmas holidays, he wrote the following response:

“If you have worked well on your development during the spring, summer, and autumn it will be to your advantage to stop your practicing entirely for a month. Such a pause renews your forces as well as the love for your work… In a tired condition of mind and body we are very apt not to notice the formation of bad habits.”

Musicians are (for the most part) in the enviable position of doing something they truly love to do for a living. We are lucky in that regard—ask a lot of people if they passionately love their job with all their heart and soul, and you’ll get more than a few odd looks and perhaps the occasional psychiatric referral. Whether it is performing, teaching, conducting, or composing, we have the good fortune to ply our trade in a field that truly enriches and rewards our souls.

This does exact a price, however. Unlike many people in “traditional” jobs, we don’t tend to leave our work at the office when 5 p.m. rolls around. Many of us are just getting started at 5 p.m., and it is hard to leave your work at the office when the office is also your home.

I don’t know about you, but I tend to be “always on” in a professional sense. If I have a spare moment, I often spend it planning some teaching, thinking about an upcoming issue of Clavier Companion , or plotting to steal a precious moment of practice. I know many of you do the same, filling your spare moments with extra gigs, performances, students, judging, church jobs, and other pursuits. I love what I do and there isn’t any job I would rather have, but it can be tiring. If we’re not careful, we can become overtaxed and our wires can begin to fray. No matter how much you love your profession, reaching a stage of burnout can test that relationship. Summer is now here, and though Hofmann was writing about a December break, summer is the perfect time for many of us to think about “charging our batteries” and replenishing our energy. The hectic schedule of the schoolyear takes a welcome break and there is (hopefully) a little time to rest and recuperate.

We use a lot of battery power in our house (two boys and a Dad who likes to play with technological toys), so in the spirit of summer and recharging for all, I offer some humble observations that might have some use as we all recharge our personal and professional batteries.

The Cordless Phone Commandment: Last week my cordless landline phone came out of its charger into service and promptly died, predictably right in the middle of a call to a large customer service department, where I had no chance of finding the person I had just spent the last 10 minutes with. I’ve been here before—the battery on the phone is shot, unable to sustain calls longer than a quick performance of the Minute Waltz. Clearly I have not remembered the important lesson of previous cordless phone failures…. you can’t leave them in the charger all the time. The battery needs to be run down regularly— leave it constantly connected and it will die. I forget this and tend to always return the phone to its charger, unwittingly killing the battery over time. I can’t help but wonder…is there a lesson here that is applicable to our own lives? Perhaps that it is unhealthy to remain “always on”— too much time plugged in can be hazardous to your health and leave you with a weak battery. Be sure to take regular breaks away from all things professional.

The Cellular Canon: This lesson, related to the cordless phone lesson, has to do with the act of recharging. My cellphone can charge while it is on or while it is completely shut down. The first method is tempting, as it allows calls to come through and keeps me from missing anything. Over the years, however, I’ve noticed the “on” charge tends to be short-lived and ineffective. The “off ” charge lasts at least twice as long. When recharging your batteries, make sure you leave ALL of your work and take a complete break. Don’t teach a couple of lessons during your vacation week, and make a day off a true day “off,” with no calls, e-mails, or other battery-draining activities. You’ll survive, I promise, and your charge may be stronger.

The Laptop Lesson: I have an older, larger laptop and my battery gives me about two hours on a full charge, if I stick to basics like word processing and e-mail. If I ask my computer to multitask in a serious way, with lots of windows open, music or video playing, and web-surfing, the battery drains faster than Niagara Falls, and I only get 45 minutes from a full battery. When our attention is split between a number of different areas our batteries drain much faster, leaving us more depleted. I think military generals have known this lesson for thousands of years—they usually try to avoid fighting wars on multiple fronts simultaneously.

The Mileage Maxim: Hybrid cars get great gas mileage because they use a large battery in conjunction with a traditional combustion engine. The kinetic energy generated by the car in motion helps to recharge this battery. To get the most out of the battery there are certain methods to driving—one of these principles, called regenerative braking, instructs the driver to lightly brake while going downhill. While this seems counterintuitive to saving gas when driving a regular car (use the hill and coast as much as possible), on a hybrid this action is quite useful and healthy for the battery. Take some time to go “downhill,” enjoying an easier path now and then. Don’t be in a huge rush to get down—brake along the way to enjoy the view and get a stronger recharge for the next uphill battle! If everything in your life is always headed uphill, that’s not good news for your battery.

Rechargeable Rules: We have a small battery charger in our house that gets a lot of use—we want to avoid both buying batteries and depositing lots of them in our landfills. The charger has a handy little LED meter that allows you to track the progress of individual batteries as they charge. There’s one problem, however: take a battery out when it is at four of five bars, even for a couple of seconds, put it back in, and the meter starts all over again at zero of five bars. When recharging your personal batteries take the time to recharge them fully and completely; failure to reach a complete charge may mean you just have to start all over again.

The Training Tenet: OK, I’m out of battery analogies, at least in the electrical sense, so I’ll toss in a physiological one to round out the column. We all know that exercise is an important part of a healthy lifestyle, but most trainers will tell you that it isn’t healthy to exercise vigorously for sustained periods every day. Muscles need rest and recharging too, and without days off in between intense training, you can actually do damage to the muscle tissue and hinder your progress. I’ll include the brain as one of these muscles that depends on regular rest. See the cordless phone commandment— we can’t be always on!

This summer I encourage you to do some of your traditional recharging, but I also encourage you to consider some of these principles for use during the year ahead. We work hard, and our hard work allows us to accomplish much. If we don’t take care of our own personal batteries, however, we could end up like my cordless phone—on the fritz when we’re needed the most! _

1 Hofmann, Josef (1976). Piano Questions Answered . New York: Dover. Original material first published in Ladies Home Journal and © 1908, 1909, and 1920. Quote above from pp. 56-57 of the Dover reprint.

 

 

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