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One last vignette. I spent years developing film in a dark room. There are no safe lights for film, so, your eyes are open but you’re in complete darkness. You have to lay out everything before you turn off the lights, and, woe to you if you drop something. I’ve spent twenty minutes trying to find a canister of film that has rolled away on the floor.

Cutting film in the dark is a hazardous undertaking. Kiddie scissors are used because it is too easy to cut yourself with sharp scissors because you can’t see anything. The eyes help us learn motor movements.

It’s funny, after a long time in complete darkness, your eyes will open so wide that you’ll see tiny pin pricks of light, if your dark room is not perfectly sealed.

I started piano as an adult 10+ years ago. Yesterday I did a lot of learning on my own. Today I have a teacher at an intermediate level.

2 years ago I met a retired man who started playing piano for a few months. He had little music background except hearing his father play piano in his childhood. With no interest learning the basics including reading music, he started with Debussy "Clair de Lune" by imitating hand patterns from online videos. The piece I wanted to get into was Bach Contrapunctus Fugue #1 from "The Art of Fugue" BWB 1080. I would skip the pieces at the beginner's level and start working on this piece from day 1. Once I'm satisfied with the result, I'd make a recording and submit the piece to the next PW Recital #58.

Many years ago, I met 2 kids who was enrolled in Suzuki piano & violin. They played duets together quite well. In my younger days, many people play music because of their parents. Today I'm spending many hours a week in front of a keyboard mainly for personal interest. As more adults like myself get into playing music, We're part of the mature generation with a lot of life experiences. We're shattering the myth from Suzuki in the 20th century that the ideal age for starting piano is very young (before age 10). And everyone of us get rewarded because of hard work, not because we have special talents.

Oh, I don't doubt that at all...

A Russian pianist friend of mine once said to me "man, you wouldn't survive one minute in Russia!"

I've always done 2,3,4, and 6. I never practised sight-reading, but I should have.

When doing no.3 I also just place my hands on the keys and pay great attention to the simplest movements, like ultra slow trills, concentrating on how it feels just to press and release my fingers.

Hmmmm, for some reason, after reading the exchanges and counter-exchanges, the accusations & counter-accusations in the past 24 hours on this thread, I felt compelled to get me a large bag of popcorn and settle down to munch, and this song (and 007) just popped into my head :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b07Z_qfchFk

Nice! I'm curious: are there any experiences that caused you to start doing this kind of thing?

Sometimes I'd practise and everything would be great, but then I'd sit down at the piano again and everything would sometimes be a mess. I figured that if I were to do the simplest thing possible, it would remind me what playing the piano feels like when it's really easy. It feels like recalibrating my playing machinery at the piano. After a while, I could get "in the zone", where there was no mental tension, and I'd be back to playing well again.

That's fantastic.

The original question boxes the compass because understanding requires learning and while learning one cannot understand. If I may rephrase it in the less self-referential form, “What do I wish I had done differently ?”, the answer is painfully obvious. I wish I had had complete confidence in myself, my technique and my musical aesthetic, and ignored everybody else. As it happened I failed to reach this delightful state until I was about fifty-five. Better late than never though.