In virtual gospel choir, everyone records herself separately and the director combines those recordings to create an online presentation. Although hearing oneself sing on a recording is always a shock-Who the heck is that?-I didn’t have any real trouble with the first three, but the most recent was hard for me. The tempo was slow, challenging my breath control, and the pitch of my section was lower than usual. I just managed to get it in on deadline, not my usual MO, and I felt compelled to sent an email apologizing for the quality.

Yet on hearing the result, I realized I wasn’t the only one who struggled. Unlike our previous efforts, this audio was pretty lousy, characterized by sloppy articulation, poor intonation, and weak expression.

The other choir members, at least those reacting on Zoom, showered this recording with the same effusive praise and expressions of love and thanks as they did the previous three. This is an open chorus, but many of its members sing well, and none to my knowledge is tone deaf, leading me to conclude that humans are as likely to undeservedly celebrate meh actions by our tribe as we are to undeservedly denigrate actions of all those weirdos out there who think crazy stuff.

While this was hardly a Light Dawns on Marblehead moment, it’s a bit of a poser when it happens in a class. Isn’t the point, after all, to learn how to do something better? If everything is already perfect, that’s literally not possible. We could have created a teachable moment by asking the musical question, Why do we sound so much worse this time?, then answering it, and then making changes.

This “class” is tribal in that one can take it repeatedly and some members have belonged for twenty years. Many of the longer-term members feel quite comfortable speaking out and have developed expectations and habits around both effort and results. While the director joined more recently and is anxious both to instruct and to produce strong performances, by age, profession, and inclination he is firmly ensconced in our century’s zeitgeist of relentless positivity.

What’s wrong with that? I would argue strongly that expecting effort to produce results, strangers to be trustworthy, employees to work to the best of their abilities, and dogs not to bark makes those results more likely. That’s positive thinking, right? But being unable to make a correction in the case of wasted effort, swindlers, slackers, and obnoxious dogs is foolish as well.

Improvement is change, and change is effected by stress. I hope I remember to remind myself of this the next time I’m running late to work and drop the milk bottle on the kitchen floor.