The Quest for Meaningful Bagpiping
Gilbert Chesterton, the early 20th century English writer, once said "If a thing is worth doing it is worth doing badly."
Chesterton was a staunch advocate of the amateur over the professional. He spoke much about activities and vocations that people must take on themselves in their own way rather than leaving them to specialists.
And that typically means screwing them up sometimes.
I think that captures the avocation of Highland bagpiping completely.
If there ever was a thing that is often done badly, it is bagpipes.
As such, it is clear that it is worth doing!
But the crux of Chesterton's quote really means that you need to be willing to stink at something if it is meaningful, before you can excel.
To do that though, we must nurture what the poet John Keats once described as our "negative capability" or, the ability “of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”
It is essentially our ability to live with doubt. And any creative pursuit (music especially) will bring a lot of doubt.
That's a hard thing to reconcile. We live in an opinion-based culture, where we are supposed to be sure about everything, and, we are all deathly afraid of being wrong.
But there is no absolute truth when we're talking about bagpipes – or music for that matter. It's an incredibly subjective art form, by its very nature. So it's no surprise that we bagpipers have cultivated a fear of uncertainty and run from the very doubt and mystery that should drive us forward.
Kathryn Shulz tackles this very thing in her book Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error
"However disorienting, difficult, or humbling our mistakes might be, it is ultimately wrongness, not rightness, that can teach us who we are.” — Kathryn Shulz
It is almost a cardinal social sin to not have an opinion about something these days, and bagpiping is not exempt. Lots of people have opinions about all kinds of bagpipe matters, players, and bands.
Lots of people also pretend to know, or claim to be sure of, things they don't know.
But to engage in a creative pursuit like bagpipe playing is to enter a whole world that is a complete mystery – whether you believe it to be or not – where there are always things that you don't know.
Perhaps it is this doubt that pushes our desire for meaning to be carved up by others and served to us ready-made as easy answers?
There is certainly less doubt that way. But we should embrace the limits to our knowledge and be free to explore the things we don't know without feeling embarrassed for not knowing them.
Put simply – there's no such thing as a stupid question, and this truth-seeking will lead us to discover many of the most beautiful things in our lives.
Curiosity is essential to our own self-discovery as we search for meaning.
Take Action
If you're a Dojo student, you can find answers to any piping questions you have with our Discord community, where our students love a robust discussion and are happy to share their insights. You can also seek answers for yourself here on the Dojo U website – visit the blog, browse the courses and library, or just use the search function to find topics, lessons, and content that can help you explore any aspect of piping you desire.
If you're not yet a Dojo Student, we'd love to welcome you! You can take the 11 Commandments course, which covers the 11 essential mindset tweaks you'll need to prepare yourself for mastery, or explore our monthly membership options and join us as a student, where you can learn more about this topic in a guided way with hundreds of other pipers around the world cheering you on!
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