I haven't written anything in a while. It's been a challenging year: we got evicted from our home at the beginning of the year and had to duke it out with our landlords, who both wanted to boot us out of the place we had lived for four years and didn't want to give us proper notice or one month rent. Renters who live in Vancouver know this experience too well. Even though we went to the Rental Tenancy Branch and won our case, we ultimately still had to find a new place to live... which we did. It's a great place, and we're happy there. But... it was draining.
After that, I left the practice that I helped build for the past five years. The last four months have been spent on that and, as with the eviction, I've worked hard and found myself in a better place. Again... it's been extremely draining. And since writing has always been the most difficult thing for me, it has unsurprisingly fallen to the very bottom of my todo lists. It is the combination of degree of difficulty with lack of resources. But I came across something recently that was so exceptional in its wisdom and relevance to the work and practice of therapy that it has Velcro-ed my ass to this chair to produce this post.
It is a pretty standard trope/joke that drummers are dumb. I was a drummer for some years, though haven't played in a long time. The joke that I remember most vividly is the following:
What do you call someone who hangs out with musicians?
A drummer.
Or one that I heard just the other day for the first time:
What's the difference between a drummer and a drum machine?
You only have to punch the information into the drum machine once.
It is widely understood that drummers are dumb brutes who bash things, whereas their musician peers play with grace and complexity.
Today I bring you wisdom from a drum throne by way of El Estepario Siberiano. His given name is Jorge, and he is 29 year-old Spaniard. El Estepario is an astonishing drummer. There is a whole cottage industry of professional drummers and drum teachers, who watch him play and each and every one of them at some point in their videos are gobsmacked or dumbstruck by what they've seen. The best example is his drummer cover/arrangement of The Weekend's Blinding Lights:
His performance is other-worldly: a combination of astonishing speed and power with musical choices and precision that still makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up (which I can confirm because I just watched it).
But the genius of El Estepario—his wisdom from a drum throne–that has gotten me writing again is not his playing but the way he expresses his awe at the playing of another drummer, a guy I had never heard of before but am now plugged into, named Miguel Lamas.
I recommend the entirety of the video, because you'll get to meet El Estepario introduce his relationship to the drums and Miguel Lamas, and... you'll get a chance to see Lamas play. Lamas's playing is masterful, like El Estepario's. Strength, blinding speed, precision, technique all belong to Lamas. But the wisdom from the drum throne comes at the end of Lamas's performance, as El Estepario talks about what he just witnessed and how he thinks about the wizardry he just experienced. The video below starts at the end of Lamas's performance, but please watch the whole thing for the full experience.
El Estepario starts by saying that Lamas has taught him "the most important lesson of my life." I might say it in a slightly different way: that Lamas and his playing created the conditions in which El Estepario could teach this lesson to himself. But let's not get distracted from the lesson itself, which is the following:
when we compare our work—or, indeed, our very selves—to others, it can produce states of demotivation or paralysis or can even cause us to give up, because we see another performing in a way that we can, perhaps, never achieve. And if we can never achieve the brilliance of what we have witnessed, then... why bother?
El Estepario is wildly talented and wildly hard working. He must receive countless messages that say some version of, "fuck it. watching you play makes me want to burn my sticks, because there is no scenario in which I can ever play like you." But the whole point of presenting the working of Miguel Lamas is for El Estepario to be able to reflect on what he does when he sees someone play in a way that is out of his reach. This is what he says about the fact of the matter:
You think I don't see people playing things I cannot play? I will never ever be able to even grasp how to play like that. I will never have the skill. I'm too old. No matter what I practice, I will never be able to play like that. And even if I did have the skill to play like that, I would never have the vocabulary or the influences to play like that.
You might think, "this is false modesty. This guy, El Estepario, is one of the most skilled drummers working today and he could do it if he wanted to." But I take him at his word. This is not defeat but acceptance. He accepts that there are beats in this world that he cannot play—or cannot play to his standards. This is the first bit of wisdom: to apprehend the world as it is. He continues:
And for some people, that becomes a burden. And it makes their practice hard and dull because no matter what you do, you will never make it there, right? It's like the horizon. No matter how far you walk, it will always be further away. If you walk two steps, it will get two steps farther. So why the fuck would you point at the fucking horizon to keep walking? That's the importance of having people like this.
He is starting to point at something here that is counter intuitive but is going to turn out to be critically important to maintaining a creative practice like drumming. And... it is going to turn out to be critically important to creating and maintaining one's forward momentum in life. What he's starting to say here—and he will stick the landing below—is that it is vitally important to be engaged in activities in life, like the horizon, that remains elusive or out of reach.
When I saw him perform, I did not feel demotivated. I felt like I was not doing enough. And I grabbed all that energy and all that frustration of not being able to do that. And I turned it into motivation, into fuel for me to try to be better every day. And no matter how hard I try, I will never be him. But truth is, my destiny was not to be him.
My destiny was to try to become the best version of myself. And his destiny was to try to become the best version of himself. And what makes you a better human and a better musician is your ability to try to be the best version of yourself and try to be better at what you do than what you were yesterday. So, I wanted to show you my personal weakness.
This is an important turn that is the heart of his wisdom: when he sees a drummer like Lamas perform in a way that he cannot, he does not allow that to demotivate him. But, just as importantly, his impulse is not to attempt to emulate what he's seeing. His impulse is to double down on the person he already is. This is critically important, because the thing El Estepario does is resist comparison. He speaks in what sounds like mystical terms, i.e. about destiny. But there's nothing mystical about it: he is simply saying that the path Lamas has walked and will walk is his own. If El Estepario confuses his path with Lamas's—that is, his destiny with another's—he will find himself lost.
This is such an important lesson: to use the energy you find in the work of another as the fuel you use to further become more of who you are, not the other. He continues:
There will always be things that I will never be able to do, and there's no better feeling than that.
He sticks the landing that he gestured to above in his discussion about an unreachable horizon. This is one of the great lessons that took me many decades more than El Estepario to learn: I call it the inextinguishable desire. El Estepario says it as plainly and succinctly as he can: that there are things out of his reach and "there's no better feeling than that."
This is an astonishing idea that is the antithesis of what we have all collectively learned. We have all been taught that what we are after is satisfaction of successfully concluding some undertaking. The lesson of consumer capitalism is that when you buy that thing—that car, that watch, that bag—you will be filled with satisfaction. But that satisfaction, if it exists at all, exists for a vanishingly short period. But this is sort of the point of consumer capitalism: to constantly experience desire that is extinguished, which then produces further desires... and further extinguishment... ad infinitum.
El Estepario, though, says something completely different, something radical. He says that "there's no better feeling" than recognizing his own limitations. At one point above he calls it "my personal weakness." I think that is not the right word for what he points at: it is not his weakness—which is a pejorative—but rather his lack. Weakness suggests he could get stronger. But a lack is more in line with his description: a way devoid of judgement to simply describe what is not there and will not be there. It is not weakness; it is an absence. He concludes with a final line that sizzles with elegant wisdom.
I wonder if he [Lamas] feels the same thing [as] any drummer. Probably he does and probably he grabs that energy and he tries to become better too. So learn from people, but don't try to be people because they already are. Try to be you.
I am infuriated (joyfully) by what he captures here. He echoes here one of the most profound—to my mind—ideas that has informed my way of working with clients in a therapeutic setting, which I found at the very beginning of what we think of as Western thought. Before the time of Socrates—some 2600 years ago—a poet named Pindar exclaimed the following:
become such as you are, having learned what that is.
This is the wisdom El Estepario offers to us, and it is just necessary today as it was two and a half millennia past. We can find energy in the pursuits of others. We can reflect on our own incapacities, our own lack, our own absences. But what we notice as absent in us is not badness but is a call to action. And, importantly, that call to action is not be what another already is. As El Estepario says, "others already are." The task for us is twofold: first, to learn the kind of being you are. And second, to use your resources to become the most you that you can.
My deepest gratitude to El Estepario Siberiano. It has been my great pleasure to watch him play over the past couple of years and to watch others lose the power of speech in trying to understand what they see him do with sticks and pedals and drums. It is isomorphic to the point of this video that his great lesson was delivered not because of what he could do but as a result of what he could not.
