D. and I have been talking on the phone (Skype on my end) pretty frequently, and one thing that keeps coming up is the importance of enjoying the process of doing something and getting better at doing something on your way to achieving the result you want.
Right now the Barber is pretty much kicking my ass. I have about 3 more weeks until I should have the whole thing basically playable and memorized in order to be ready to make a recording of it. It's too much, but in working out how to play this piece (and noticing what I can't play), I'm learning more about technique. And knowing that I have violin students who will be able to benefit from my own process really makes me concentrate on what I'm doing and ask myself questions about it and calmly (ahem) try to figure out why the heck I can't play this section when it doesn't seem that hard. Tonight I was able to vastly improve the technique of 2 of my violin students using something I devised over the weekend while working on the Barber. It took 5 minutes for each student and now they look totally different and are playing much more easily. It's kind of mind-boggling.
I'm not sure whether I'll be able to do fantastic spiccato in 3 or 5 weeks. It would be kind of a miracle anyway, since I could never really consistently do spicatto pre-MS. But I'm actually a lot closer to understanding how it works and seeing (partly) what I'm doing wrong. One step at a time. Maybe someday I can teach somebody how to do spiccato in 5 minutes--wouldn't that be a great trick!