Surprising Myself Pleasantly for a Change

When I began throwing pots on the wheel, it sometimes took me forever to center the clay, and I often lost patience and went ahead and tried to make a pot, even though it wasn't centered. The results were sometimes interesting, but I didn't have much control over them. Recently I've improved, so that I can almost always center a smallish hunk of clay quite quickly. In fact, I'm often surprised to find that I've succeeded and can hardly believe that I've done it. The next steps are to learn to center larger hunks of clay, and, of course, to keep the pot centered all the way through the making of it.

Similarly, when I began trying to improvise, it was very hard for me to stay together with the rhythm section and reach the end of the piece the same time they did. I used to get lost all the time. Now I pretty much know where I am. I hear the accompaniment better, I keep the song in my inner ear more consistently, and I can plan my improvisation better (like increasing the number of moves you can plan in a chess game). But I'm still surprised to discover I haven't gotten lost.

I've got a long way to go both in pottery and in music, but it's nice to see that there's been some progress: I've achieved more control over the process.

However, there's a danger in that, too, because too much control stifles creativity. It all depends on where you apply the control. You want to master a craft, so that the material does what you want it to do, but you also wanted to liberate your imagination, so that you can want to do interesting things. Sometimes less skillful artists manage to be more creative than the masters, to compensate for their shortage of skill.