Can You Turn off Your Professional Brain and Just Enjoy Something Like Your Work as a Hobby?

Hello, welcome to A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Matt Armson from Portage, Wisconsin.

Hi, Matt. Welcome to the show.

Hey, Grant. Thanks for having me on.

What can we do for you?

Well, I had a question for you guys. It has to do with your ability to kind of turn off the linguist and participate in, I guess, casual and normal everyday conversation. It kind of stems from me being a musician. So I know sometimes it’s hard for me to just sit back and enjoy music, to turn it off and not analyze guitar riffs and time signatures and key signatures and actually just see and listen to the music for what, you know, maybe the artists intended it to be. And I’m wondering about you guys and language. Obviously, you guys are experts in your field. And is it ever hard for you to just turn it off and sit back and just enjoy conversation without having to analyze it?

Yes.

Yes, yes, yes.

I want to hear about you. You’re a musician. Do you teach or do you tutor or something? Do you play bands, do shows, that sort of thing?

I’ve been in a lot of bands in my life and just grew up around a lot of music. My parents were musicians as well. I actually am in marketing. I don’t do anything with music today. It’s a hobby of mine, but I’ve spent so much time studying it and around it. It’s sometimes hard for me to just shut it off and sit back and enjoy it. But I do love music and play music today.

So what’s that feeling like? You’ve got somebody says, here’s a CD I think you’re really going to enjoy. You pop it in. You’re trying your best to enjoy it, and you can’t.

Yeah, it’s hard. Sometimes you have to, for me anyways, I have to actively be like, you know what? I’m just going to kind of go to my happy space and just, you know, almost like immerse yourself in the music. Just kind of let it wash over you.

Do you guys ever run into that with language? Are you in social situations where you’re like, you know what, I need to sit back and enjoy it and not analyze what’s going on linguistically?

Yeah, Matt, I’m so glad you’ve raised this question because I’ve wondered about other people like film critics. Can you go to a movie and just let go and enjoy? Or even gourmet cooks. Is it too difficult to go to a restaurant and you find yourself overanalyzing the food? But speaking for myself, I would say absolutely I’ve had that problem. In fact, when I was in college and I was taking both ancient Greek and Old English at the same time, I found it so difficult to read fiction in English. I would get so distracted. My mind would just ricochet off the individual words because I was seeing potential connections and etymologies, and my mind would just go caroming off this word or that, and then I would think about the word caram and how it may come from a Spanish word that means the red ball in billiards. And then I would get completely distracted from that and completely distracted from the plot. And there was a time in college for quite a while that I had real, real difficulty just sitting back and enjoying fiction. And I actually went to one of my professors, one of my English professors, and I said, I cannot focus on the narrative because I’m so distracted by the language. She suggested reading mysteries and cliffhangers and things that were more simple that I could just sort of let go and be propelled by wondering who done it. And that was kind of the way that I rehabilitated myself. And then later, becoming a writer, I also have trouble sometimes just reading writing by really good people because I feel like I can hear the clanking of the machinery, as somebody put it. You know, you’re analyzing how they put that together. So, yeah, I feel you.

Yeah, that same here. And I’ve got to say that I’m on a couple editing Facebook groups, and I see this complaint time and time again from copy editors and editors who are like, I had some time off this weekend. We set aside some time for the family just to sit around and read together, and I couldn’t read. I had this stack of books, and I couldn’t do it. And I have the same problem where sometimes the clanking of the machinery is too much. And it’s not just for books. I have this problem with podcasts and radio. I’m like, I’m listening to this new podcast that I won’t name. And the content is good. And the spirit is good. And I know what they put into it. I know the money that they put into it. I’ve just got to say that they fell down in like four or five different places. And I just, I really want to write them a memo going like, here’s something. And I know that Martha and I are always working to make our own show better. So I feel hypocritical. But I’m like, oh, I just, oh, yes. But Martha’s strategy about the pop boilers is one of my strategies that came up on my own, which is sometimes I just read the worst trash because it’s all about getting you to the destination to find out who done it. Just this escapist junk because you don’t care and you just throw out the window any pretense at all that there’s any art there at all. I will also say paying a lot of attention to errors and bad plotting and different literary mistakes that someone might be making is the great cultivator. It is the great pruner, the great weeder outer. And so I can put aside a lot of books that I might otherwise waste my time on. And so when I do find that one book that is so brilliant, so fabulously written, so beautiful, that I don’t mind the errors, I know that I have found a lifetime keeper. I have the book that I can read and put on my shelf and read again in a few years. And those are so rare and precious. So it’s kind of a nice thing. So having that inability to stick to something because I’m always looking for the typos and the mistakes and the bad writing, maybe it’s a good thing sometimes.

Well, yeah. Yeah. Matt, I’m wondering if it’s if the experience is like for you, like the difference between learning scales or learning exercises. And then you finally get to that point where you can just let go of that and soar. You know, you’re not even thinking about about what you’re doing.

Yeah, well, Grant, what you said about finally finding that piece or that composer or that album or creation of music that you can just sit back and enjoy, it’s very similar. At least for me anyways, I come back to some early albums that I grew up with. My mom played a lot of Chicago, so, oh man, there’s nothing. I could put on some Saturday in the Park and I was like, there’s nothing wrong with this. This is perfect. I feel the same way about that stuff.

Same here.

Well, I’ve got to thank you, Matt, for this because I know this is going to open up some doors for a lot of other listeners who are going to have similar experiences with their own careers. So thank you for that.

Pleasure.

Thank you for having me on.

Take care.

Take care, Matt.

Bye-bye.

Bye-bye.

How do you handle that in your world? How does it work for you when you need to turn off the professional brain and just enjoy things? Let us know, 877-929-9673. Email words@waywordradio.org or talk to us on Twitter @wayword.