Making things possible is what leads us to the fulfillment of our desires and the good life. It’s also key to getting things done with as little time-wasting as possible. Sometimes though it can be fun and revealing to go deep into the personally impossible once in a while.

When I began to play the guitar it all started out as personally impossible but I persisted doggedly through the first painful steps until I could play a few chords well and move from one to another with a steady rhythm. I was on a learning curve but it wasn’t a smooth progression. I had bursts where I would grapple with a new chord or technique and once I had some level of competence I would keep at it until I could do it without having to consciously think about - until I had developed ‘finger memory’ as it was once described to me as. Then I would plateau and just keep repeating that with no further learning progress. In my early days I had a very limited set of skills and so I would get frustrated and eventually take the plunge into learning something new.

By chance an interesting thing happened when I attempted to learn a piece of music that was way, way over the top of my abilities. It was a jumping number called Anji by Davy Graham, more popularly known by a cover version done by Simon and Garfunkel. I still remember the moment when I went to visit my friend Dave Moore and first heard this piece of music. His wife opened to door to me and Dave was already playing. I could hear this great baseline with a mesmerizing melody over the top. I thought two guitarists were playing but then I entered the room and there was Dave alone playing this wonderful piece of music. I was dumbstruck. I had no idea that such music could be produced from a guitar, let alone from just one guitar. At that moment I swore to myself that I had to learn it. It was too complex for Dave to show me but he gave me the sheet music from which I could learn it by myself.

I was obsessed with that piece of music and it was way too advanced for my abilities at that time but I battled continuously onwards with it. I went deep into the impossible. Of course I felt enormous frustration and inadequacy but I just thought, “What the hell, let’s see just how far I can get.” Slowly I picked my way through the piece and there were tiny little bits that I could manage so I mastered those bits. That at least made me feel that I was part of the way through my journey. Gradually I teased out more and more of the piece and developed my abilities to with playing the guitar. It took weeks and weeks to finally put the whole thing together but I discovered through this process a great advantage.

On the days when I just threw up my hands in frustration I would stop and play other things that I could do, just to put myself back in touch with what competencies that I had so that I didn’t feel totally inadequate. Remarkably, I found that everything had become so much easier and the things that I had struggled with previously and that were at the limit of my ability were now doable. This was the unexpected and beneficial advantage of going deep into the impossible; of accepting that great frustration would be a consequence of setting my standards higher but going for it anyway.

After discovering this I made it a tactic for advancing my abilities. From then on, if I took on the learning of a new piece of music or a new technical skill and found it maddeningly difficult, I would search for something even more difficult to do and work at that for a while. Then when I came back to the other piece I found it so much easier to perform. It’s a weird technique because it’s counter-intuitive but it does work, I can assure you.

It’s a kind of mental mountain-climbing. I don’t do mountain-climbing as I don’t really get the point of it but when I quiz others on the desire to climb a mountain and to take on physical peril and to prepare and develop skill and ability just to this aim, a common response is “because it’s there.” I have a similar take on tackling mentally challenging tasks. I don’t have to do them and they can prove perilous to my sanity if I don’t take the proper care and attention but I do get a kick out of overcoming the challenge and of expanding my abilities. Plus, the process brings multiple rewards for tackling other tasks. An expansion of ability in one field of endeavor lends itself to expanding ability in another and for fulfilling ever greater desires in life developing higher and higher levels of competency is the name of the game.

Going deep into the impossible works best for things that you don’t have to depend upon and for which massive frustration and feelings of inadequacy are not going to derail you and make you feel desperate. It’s good for hobbies and personal activities where the only thing at stake is your desire to stretch the limits of what you are personally capable of doing. It can prove demoralizing if you fixate solely upon delivering a result but that is not the purpose here. The purpose is to challenge yourself to extend personal limitations and to go one step beyond, nothing more than that. This takes you out of your comfort zone in a comfortable way. It does this because you don’t build in dependencies upon performance or expectations of a great result. You know how difficult the task ahead is but you do it anyway, just for the challenge, just to see what more is possible for you.

And now, for your listening pleasure, a nickpagan.com first - a podcast of me playing Anji (with a few modifications of my own)!

And if you want to hear the real deal, Davy Graham is still gigging.

My first guitar hero, Dave Moore, doesn’t gig but he is an authority on Jack Kerouac (amongst many other things).

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