Because the process of learning is one without end, a professional will always also be an amateur throughout the whole of her life. The professional is first born as an amateur, then spends enough time exercising the skill, that she is able to break into a new realm of understanding, of submission to the skill, making her no longer just the student, but ironically the master of it.
The Amateur reveals herself in her effortful approach to mastery. At times awkward and timid, she curiously stumbles through new expansive chambers that have transient walls. And she expends great effort wondering if she can truly pass through them. By encountering these ‘walls’ frequently and with persistence, she is able to perceive them as mere illusions and finally make it through, uncovering new chambers on the other side. This happens in a sort of lucid dream state, over and over, urging the Amateur, with patience and desperation, to keep discovering new chambers. This patience and desperation serve to push the Amateur through hallways at which she’d normally pause, unsure which might be the ‘right’ path to take. Through those hallways, the Amateur is able to unearth the potential to transform herself into a Professional.
Where the Amateur may pause, reluctant to take authority over her skill, the Professional will glide past, almost in a drunken dance to a waltz whose beginning she knows well. She’s been here before and has mastered its cunning elegance in meter, its intoxicating, cascading arpeggios, as well as the undeniable risk involved in following it through narrow corridors. Yet, as she dances, new flowers bloom in the fields of her mind, the windows of her ears are blown open, and new winds come in and flow throughout the whole of her, such that even when she reaches that point in the waltz that she’s never encountered before, the Professional can let herself be taken by the winds of its whims.
We can think of the dynamic between the professional and the amateur as the dynamic between a master and a student. There may be a period of delay in between the moment a student becomes a master and the moment a student becomes aware of her mastery. For a period of time, the Amateur looks to the outside world to satisfy all that is confused inside of her. To take an idea from Rilke, I would say that the mastery enters into the Amateur unassumingly, without alarm, and she is changed immediately, in the way that a house changes when a guest enters into it. And eventually she can perceive herself as a Professional and in a perfect situation, so too does the world.
About Money
If we take into consideration the root ‘profession’ in professional, then we can consider the economic implications of the distinction between a professional and an amateur. A professional is a skilled worker who is awarded money for her work. From her skill, she makes a ‘profession’, one that continually drives her overall purpose for creating, and becomes dependent on extrinsic value in order to remain alive.
In the same token, I take it as no accident that the root ‘ama’ is found in the word ‘amateur’, depicting the root of love, or soul in the work of the amateur.
(to be continued...maybe)
