with my little garden spade and keep scraping at the thing that confuses me.” Sarah Koenig of Serial, Season One.
Don’t have any idea who Sarah Koenig is, or what Serial is? Then stop reading this post right now and head on over to the Serial Season One website. When you’ve come back up for air you can return here. How I envy you if you somehow managed
to escape the hype and this will be all new to you! It’s sort of the way I feel about reading the climactic scene in Lord of the Rings when the ring is finally destroyed. I will never again get to read that passage for the first time.
Anyway, I remembered Sarah’s comment when I was trying to track down some of the facts relating to the tragedy in Benghazi, Libya that happened over four years ago. Watch for an e-book on the topic available through this website or on Kindle; I’m trying to get it done before the second Presidential debate on Oct. 9. Since the topic didn’t come up during Monday’s debate it will probably be a part of the next matchup. I’m trying to bring a little clarity to the whole mess, as I don’t see that anyone has tried to write anything that pulls all the threads together, although there’s excellent material that focuses on just one aspect of the story. I want to know why Christopher Stevens went to Benghazi, and why Bob, the Chief Station Agent at the CIA Annex in Benghazi (whose full name has never been revealed) ordered the four guys being sent to the rescue to “stand down” (or did he?), and why Ahmed Abu Khattala planned the attack. On and on. You start out with these general statements and then keep zooming in until you’re down to what’s called “granular detail.”
But this idea of just sticking to what you’re doing and not getting sidetracked applies to so many issues. I was thinking this morning as I watched the pianist during the singing at the Bible study I attend that piano-playing was one of those areas where I failed to just stay home with my little garden spade. I write about this whole aspect of my life in my book on happiness, but I don’t explore this particular aspect. The thing was, I just needed to learn how to play hymns from the hymnbook for our little church in Virginia. We didn’t sing modern choruses and we didn’t have a choir. I just needed to play four hymns and an offertory for both the morning and the evening Sunday services, but the offertory only needed to be about 30 seconds long. I could just have played one verse of a hymn. I needed to sit at the piano and play those hymns over and over until I knew them. That’s all. Scrape, scrape, scrape.But my ideas were much more grandiose: I was going to become one of those fancy hymnplayers like the ones in the church where I grew up. I was going to learn how to race up and down the keyboard. So what did I do? I bought a huge binder of hymn arrangements. I bought books on hymnplaying. And I signed up for piano lessons from an excellent teacher. The only problem was that he cared not one whit for teaching me what I really needed to know. His idea was that one should learn classical piano, and then those techniques would carry over into all the other playing that one might do. Which would have been fine, I realized much later, if I’d been 16 years old. But I didn’t need to spend hours practicing on a Chopin piece and then hope that my work on that would carry over on Sunday morning as I struggled through something like “The Solid Rock.” I needed to just work on what I needed to play. But just doing that, sitting at the piano for half an hour or 45 minutes a day, wasn’t nearly as exciting as driving through horrible traffic half an hour each way to spend half an hour at a lesson, and then getting myself signed up to play in the yearly recital and just about killing myself trying to learn Debussy’s “Arabesque.” All very gratifying afterwards, when I had managed to get through it without disgracing myself, to get a hug from my teacher and hear others’ admiring words. But it wasn’t worth it.
Sure, sometimes you need to launch out into an ambitious project, to stretch yourself. Mostly, though, you need to do what you already know you need to do. It’s hard sometimes to sort things out. Here I sit at almost 8:30 PM, and have I put in any time today scraping away at the Benghazi story? Not one minute, I’m afraid. Too much reading about Monday’s debate (just one more article!) and no work on my own stuff. (But if you’d like to read what I’ve posted about the upcoming election you can head over to the “personal and political” blog on this website.)
What should you be scraping away at?