In his book, How Children Learn, author and educator John Holt describes a key difference in the approach of a child versus an adult when it comes to trying something new.
When he brings out his cello to a group of children they often ask him to play it. He responds by playing a very active piece, one of Bach’s preludes. When he is done he offers them a turn, to which they eagerly accept.
They mimic his up and down feverish bowing, and try to do just what he was doing. He says, “They are not so much trying to figure out how to play the cello as actually playing it.”
After a while, they grow tired of making nonsense sounds and want to know how it really works. “But” he says “the total activity comes first”.
It doesn’t take the child long to figure out the basic idea of the cello and make it produce a nice sound. But “while he has been figuring this out he has been ceaselessly active.” In this activity, he has collected a lot of seemingly useless information. While the adult scientist gets his answer from minimizing non-pertinent stimuli and quieting down the noise, “the child gets his answers out of the noise.”
There is a New Moon in Aries this week on Thursday, April 20th. As the ambassador of Spring, Aries celebrates total activity. Take a page from the “ceaselessly active” child this transit, and try to find your answers out of the noise. Try to find the right questions and patterns out of the sweeps of information, even if that information seems useless. If you have to ‘hear’ Bach’s prelude in your head to help you do this then go ahead and hear it. Himself an Aries, Bach said “Ceaseless work, analysis, reflection, writing much, endless self-correction, that is my secret.”
Holt ends this chapter by saying this:
“But the greatest difference between children and adults is that most of the children to whom I offer a turn on the cello accept it, while most of the adults, particularly if they have never played any other instrument, refuse it.”
Don’t let your ‘better thinking’ get the best of you. Keep playing.
Nature's Zodiac 
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