Today I am Writing: On Automatic Processes

I wrote of the pens, dotting my house, and then I left it but I forgot to say: I carry a pen with me everywhere I go, anyway.

I climb up the stairs and I place the books heavy down on the desk, and though it has been established I will find pens there, in my hand there is a pen. Just like when I move from the living room chair to the notepad in the kitchen, and on the table there is a practical colony of pens, but in my hand, there is also one.

It's just an automatic process.

One in which I do not think.

There are others; the wake-in-the-night-with-a-gasp because I cannot remember what email address I chose when I sent a particular email that day. Did I send it, the right way?

Of course I did. I chose the name so automatically, my brain just didn't notice.

I sit around the table with the colleagues having lunch, and we talk about language and hearing music with our eyes, and someone brings up the automatic processes of how we make sense of the things we hear and read and see. "Something's happening!" we say, but we're such an expert at it by now, we pretty much don't even need ourselves in order to make it happen.

I know this of course; teaching for expertise is what I think a lot about, and "automatic processes" are what I actively work to build every time a piano baby steps into my house. But I lie awake at night and hear my fears do battle with my dreams, and I realize that we are experts at many ways and beings of things. The helpful things, yes; but the destructive things too. Expertly woven in automatic process, they define every step of every day. A lifetime of steps, and we do not even know.

These are the expertises that keep us locked up tight,
spinning in our webs.

Then suddenly something jumps out-- its looking for attention! You notice it in all the places, you can no longer ignore you carry it in your hand like a pen you will not need.

You cannot quite make out what it is...but you can see you cannot see. You begin to see its traces, though, long history documented right there in your skin.

And so you begin to focus your eyes. You begin to watch, to listen.

And then you begin to unravel the chains. You begin to walk,

until there is a new automatic;

free.