What it feels like to flourish
I have been spending some time during the pandemic relearning the piano. I am focusing on jazz piano because it lends itself better to the stray ten or fifteen minutes I get to play in a given day. At first I felt that the playing was wooden and awkward — it had been years since I played with any regularity. After a few months, I not only regained the little I knew of jazz piano, but I started to get better. A few online tutorials helped, as did listening, imitating, and taking notes. At some point the momentum of this improvement reached a kind of terminal velocity, a feeling that it was progressing of its own accord without my effort. I was flourishing.
I’m thinking about flourishing a lot these days, because increasingly it is the word I ascribe to the primary purpose of our social institutions, school among them: to promote human flourishing. And I have been most worried about how hard it is to flourish in current social conditions. When you are flourishing, you take flight. You do not necessarily reach a particular destination — professional prowess, fluency, or even mastery, say— but you are working toward it, the work feels less and less onerous, and there is more joy in the work.
Very young children have bursts of natural flourishing that are precious and often awe-inspiring to behold. Popular developmental parenting books like The Wonder Weeks refer to these bursts as “leaps” — sudden physical, cognitive, and social breakthroughs. They occur more or less naturally, in the absence of deprivation. (I read a provocative idea about children’s cognitive development in The Learning Brain by Torkel Klingberg (pg. 94)— that it is possible that early cognitive development operates a bit like our need for important vitamins, in that not having any stimulation can have catastrophic consequences, but having more than a minimal baseline amount provides no particular benefit.)
When a child is in the early days of a leap, they are also in a state of turmoil. Emotional distress can be a common indicator of a leap, as can changed sleeping patterns, appetites, and behaviors. Meanwhile, the subject of the leap — language development, physical dexterity, spatial navigation — comes online with astonishing speed. In some cases, children seem to change their basic orientation toward the world overnight. In many cases the development really is happening overnight: young children grow as they sleep.
Beyond these early phases of natural growth, there is the more conceptual flourishing that occurs as children expand their understanding of the world through learning. This may be through language development, musical acuity, physical skill, mathematical understanding, or some other area — here I am more or less persuaded by Howard Gardner’s mapping of multiple intelligences across discrete, if interconnected, domains of knowledge.
Like a leap, a period of flourishing also emerges from a period of turmoil, though here the word I would use is perhaps ferment. During these periods, the emotional and physical vicissitudes of a leap are more indirect — you train your muscles, your neural pathways, you develop automaticity; the ability to appear to do something effortlessly usually takes a great deal of effort. There is great agitation in these periods, especially if your baseline for understanding a new thing is low.
Such agitation, compounded through the banality and boredom of practice, often leads to rebellion. The mind rebels; the body rebels. With the right guidance, the right kind of practice, the right orientation to a goal, the agitation slowly abates, even if it never technically disappears.
I remember when I began to flourish as a pianist: it was when the ear that I was born with had automatic access to the movements I was training in my fingers. I had an excellent early piano teacher who found ways to keep these rote exercises fun when they would have otherwise deterred me. And I had an ear to fall back on when the motions didn’t work and my fingers wouldn’t cooperate. I could hear the music that I was meant to play and had some understanding of what needed to be accomplished to bring it out of my hands.
I flourished as a pianist roughly between the ages of 6 and 12. This was a time when the difficulty of the pieces, my general interest in music, the quality of my instruction, and my opportunities to improve were all in perfect harmony. I always hated to practice, but I understood what practicing could do, and I did what I needed to do. I won competitions. I showed off constantly.
By my teens, I was no longer flourishing as a pianist, even though I was keeping it up and improving. The practice was more difficult, and my motivation to tackle challenging pieces outpaced my diligence to actually learn them. I started getting second place, third place, honorable mention, slowly losing my edge as those who practiced far more rigorously mastered pieces that I could only just manage, if perhaps with enough feeling (from the “ear”) to make them sound nice in a technically unpolished state.
And in my late teens I floundered. My ambitions were grossly misaligned with my flagging dedication. My teacher at this time was so good that this mismatch often resulted in me just barely getting across the finish line to playability — but new obstacles arose. My muscle memory from very early on had led to my hands locking up at the pinky and ring fingers of both hands during fast passages, a feature of strong early neural wiring that I could have only combatted through months of painstaking neuroplasticity-oriented finger exercises.
When I switched to jazz piano with a different teacher, my motivation and skill realigned somewhat. I enjoyed listening to the music more and could envision myself playing it. It was technically less challenging and relied more on my ear than my hands. The practice itself was less like the careful sculpting of bodybuilding, note by note and measure by measure, and more like practicing a sport — learning a set of rules, doing some drills on basic maneuvers but keeping an open mind to spontaneity and improvisation. There was more of a sense of play in it, which I enjoyed, but I was also back at a level — I would call it “intermediate” — in which I could flourish in the way I did in my early classical piano career.
Piano is a useful metaphor for learning for me because it is the one domain of my knowledge where there was nowhere to hide when I floundered. I could not filibuster or change the subject, or provide easier solutions than the ones that were asked of me. When I hadn’t practiced, I could hear it, and so could everyone else. And when I flourished, no external reward or affirmation — or lack thereof — could boost or diminish my pride. I was riding high; I was never a professional pianist but I was solid and improving; the goal in my head matched what I could hear with my own two ears.
How can we help children flourish?
There are the environmental factors: the resources, teachers, and opportunities needed to make enough progress to achieve lift-off.
There are the dispositional factors: the innate capacities (limited and by no means insurmountable but real), motivations, and personal visualization of mastery.
And there are the more or less chance factors: the right timing, the right early choices, the distinctions between one pursuit and another. These are often elements that can’t be planned for or nurtured in advance.
As schools remain closed for the foreseeable future, I wonder what ways we can find to combat floundering and encourage flourishing. The first step is staving off deprivation — this is why I wish schools could focus on opening as spaces of care for a limited population. After that, it is far less obvious what success looks like. I can think of only a few domains in which I truly flourished without a clear model or skilled teacher.
Still, there are other elements that we can support. We can recognize not only a child’s interest, but the areas in which they exhibit dedication and motivation to improve, even if we are not experts in these areas. We can at least support children in pursuing these motivations by providing structures for practice and by coaching them through the more difficult periods of agitation: the frustration, the boredom, the turmoil. And we can be open to lots of opportunities for children to learn skills that are not ones we would otherwise understand or care about ourselves, loading up on models and resources, and seeing where they go. (My son is currently enamored with circuits and black holes, two subjects I know little more about than he does.)
Perhaps schools should operate this way — though I have an opposite sense that such passions are better left to enrichment, small group, and apprenticeship models. Schools may be better suited to lay the groundwork for children to flourish elsewhere. But it seems like as long as children are learning outside of school anyway, it makes sense to lean in to the few ways that children might flourish in a time better suited for floundering.
