Most of you know the story of me and the guitar. I took a girlfriend to a concert for her birthday, fell in love with the music and noticed they were losing their guitar player and decided to be in that band in the fall. That was fifty years ago ( Pause to catch my old-man breath ).
Over the years since then, I have put away the guitar for years at a time. There was a period of about twenty years where I didn’t even own one. Now, I have four and haven’t played in over a year. I need to clear away a bunch of crap before I can even get to the closet where the guitars are!
And that’s held me back. If they—or even one—were available quickly and easily, I’m sure I’d have spent some time playing. Take the dog out back… bring the guitar. Twenty minutes until Kathie gets home and We Have Stuff To Do? Pick up the guitar!
It’s becoming clearer and clearer to me that I’m going to have to start actively scheduling my time. I mean really sit down and decide that if I’m going to get a handle on our finances I’m going to need to devote fifteen minutes per day entering numbers into Quicken. If I’m going to get the room we call our office cleaned up, I’m going to have to actually schedule some time every day to specifically work on it. I need to set a goal of walking around the block once per day—and then follow-through on it.
The best memories I have of playing guitar were a few weeks either side of my senior year of high school. I’d accumulated enough credits to graduate early, but I loved being in the band and I loved my friends and knew they’d scatter to the four winds in June anyway, so I stuck around. I had a lot of study halls in my class schedule and I had them all changed to the band room. I ended up playing guitar on average of about five or six hours per day. I was good.
I don’t mean to sound arrogant or conceited. It’s entirely possible for someone to think they’re great at something when they’re not. But it’s impossible for them to be great at something and not know it. I was good. But I was in it all day, every day. I had fingertips that looked like toes. I could hear tones and intervals and play along with songs I’d never heard before. It was fantastic. But those skills age like fresh produce. And five or six years after graduation, when the only time I’d pick up my guitar was to move it from under the bed to the top of the closet, it was frustrating to try to play things that once came so easily to me and now were a struggle.
I’ve got to get back into this. My life has been best when I was out of debt, could really play guitar and when I had a dog. I can get a few of those back, if I’m willing to work at it.
I hope.
