Too often I find myself mourning skills I have lost to time. At one point in my life I was utterly convinced that I would become a professional musician, or at least try my damndest to make it work. And sure enough, I got pretty good; I was playing and writing between 6 and 8 hours a day for various groups. I would compose art music (string quarters), do lots of songwriting (for various bands), arrange for ensembles (a cappella). This was basically my whole life for a year or two in college.
When I graduated college, I had no real plan other than “play music in bands” which is not a very good plan. But I did it anyway, and I got to do some cool things! I played lots of gigs! I played at SXSW one year. I got to play with fantastic people and write music I liked, played a lot of music I didn’t like, and realized it wasn’t for me. My day job was more and more fulfilling, and music felt less and less like my calling for a variety of reasons.
When I sit down to play, now, ten years later, what feels like a lifetime later, I find myself despondent and angry. I am immediately confronted with an inability to do even a tenth of what I used to be able to. Not only do I feel a kind of grief, I feel a failure to live up to who I wanted to be and I’m forced to confront a change in who I am; I used to be a musician and now I am not and I just feel like a complete poser.
Athletes know this feeling well; my partner was a fiercely competitive and talented track athlete in college and when she puts herself in the situation to run I imagine it is a similar feeling of loss, of failure, of grief, and of identitarian conflict. There’s a kind of dysmorphia I imagine, not in the bodily sense but in the sense of knowing physically in yourself that you have some capacity and then you reach for it and it simply isn’t there anymore. Some ghost of it lives on.
I am now an academic, I’m in a PhD program, and I think I’m facing something entirely similar. On what is probably my favorite podcast, Karyn Lai and Peter Adamson discuss the distinction between “knowing that” and “knowing how” as well as “knowing to”. I’m sure this is not new for everyone, but I had not considered skill as a kind of knowledge, a “knowing how.” I never considered my capacities as knowledge, or considered that knowledge was something you could not just forget on a factual basis, like forgetting content, but also as something you could forget how to do, as in that a capacity might shrink.
I’m not sure how all of this connects, but it has made me reflect on the role of practice in building knowledge.
As an academic I studied for, and passed, qualifying exams. I treated it as a series of things I needed to know; that knowledge would then be probed and I would rely on the things that I knew and string them together and show that I knew them, and this would be sufficient to qualify me for the remainder of the PhD. But MUCH more important than knowing the things you need for these exams is having the capacity to solve the problem, which is an entirely different kind of knowledge.
Already I can feel these capacities shrinking. I have fallen back to the things I am comfortable with, which got me interested in research in the first place, namely data, identification, econometrics, and programming. But I find myself losing the ability to think through problems that I knew how to do not too long ago, just as I have lost the capacity to play music.
I think the only solution to this is practice. In music and sports, practice is a ubiquitous concept, and in religion or spirituality people regularly talk about “having a practice.” In the academic sphere I think it is less common to make space for practice. Instead of practice being a core part of how you generate the knowledge to pursue your art, once you have shown the capacity to learn how to do something it can safely be abandoned in its own right, there to pick up later. But I think that this is fairly limiting, because when I want to write down a model I want the facility to be there, to work through it, to solve it quickly.
All of this to say, while I don’t do New Year’s resolutions all that often I think I’m going to try to commit to this being a year of practice. I am going to treat practice as worthwhile in itself, not just a thing I have to do in order to recover some loss, running up a down escalator or a giant sand dune, but something that is itself a way of knowing, of learning, and of teaching. I’m going to try to sit in that, practicing piano, practicing guitar, and practicing my qualifying exam questions. That practice is a means to preserve “knowing how” in the way that writing something down in a book helps to preserve “knowing that.” I did an asset pricing problem today, and I think I’ll do one tomorrow too.