What Learning to Play the Guitar Taught Me About Life

Adapt New Knowledge to Everywhere Else

As my loyal readers know, I recently took up the guitar. I have been teaching myself for almost three months now and have been quite pleased with my progress. This progress has come primarily from my being retired and suddenly having much less else to do during the pandemic.

But I’ve also noticed the things I have learned while practicing the guitar are adaptable to other areas in my life. Maybe, it’s being older, or it could be just another by-product of plenty of spare time. But I’ve realized that you can use new knowledge acquired in one area of your life to all other areas.

Before I get into specifics, here is a real-world example that most anyone can relate to. At some point in our lives, almost all of us learned how to drive a car. Three of the skills that you should have acquired from learning to drive are:

• Patience
• Attention to Detail
• Situational Awareness

All three skills are useful in driving a car, but all three can also be applied to other areas of your life. But too often, we go the other way. We let our lack of skills in one area bleed over into others. If we lack patience, attention to detail, and situational awareness in our day to day lives, we become worse drivers because of that.

It should be the other way around. We acquired these new skills while learning how to drive. We should have applied them to other areas of our lives and become more patient and observant as a result.

So, getting back to the guitar. I tried to learn to play the guitar when I was a teenager. Actually, that’s a lie. I owned a guitar when I was a teenager and made a lot of random noise with it. I never learned how to play it for one simple reason. I never tried to learn how to play it.

This time around, older and wiser (much and slightly, respectively), I am actually taking the time to learn the guitar. The requirements for this learning and the results of learning are, in no particular order:

• Patience (I’m sensing a pattern here)
• Building skills one at a time
• Knowing it’s okay to do something for free
• Adaptability to change
• Seeking pleasure from simple things

Patience

I remember in the ’60s (guess I wasn’t there if I can remember) posters were a huge business. One of my favorites showed two buzzards sitting in a tree, and one said to the other, “Patience Hell, I Want to Kill Something.”

And while my lack of patience doesn’t extend that far, I do have it in limited supply. (Well, why don’t you get to the point, then?) I have learned over the years that the amount I have in my patience reservoir can vary from day to day, but once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Learning the guitar requires almost infinite patience, so how have I reconciled these two things? Well, if you’ll have a little patience, I’ll tell you.

My patience as it applies to learning the guitar actually has two modes, as it were. One is my lack of patience for the process as a whole. In other words, I want to be able to play anything I want, RIGHT NOW!

The other is a lack of patience for the process. Learning to play is a prolonged process full of tiny, tedious, and repetitious steps.

How can I possibly learn to play the guitar if it requires something of which I have so little?

Because I really want to be able to play music. And as we have all learned, if we want something badly enough, we become willing to sacrifice whatever it takes to achieve it. Be it time, money, or in this case, patience, we will give it up to get what we want.

This is most likely true of any musical instrument, but in one way, the guitar and other stringed instruments are uniquely suited to cultivate this newfound patience.

I got my first real six-string Bought it at the five-and-dime Played it ’til my fingers bled Was the summer of ‘69 ~ Bryan Adams

The day I got home with the guitar, I wanted to sit down and practice for a couple of hours a day. In this way, I figured I could master it in a week or two. But there was something I forgot from my childhood.

It hurts.

After a couple of minutes of scraping your fingertips across thin pieces of wire, you are done for the day. This self-inflicted pain created the patience needed, whether I liked it or not. After a few days, I could play for five minutes. A week later, I could go for fifteen or twenty. Now, almost three months later, I can play for an hour or two if I want, but the lessons I learned from those early, painful sessions carry over.

And it carries over to the rest of my life.

I have found that my patience reservoir is a little fuller and drains a little slower. Best of all, I can sit down to play for a few minutes and fill it back up again. People close to me will tell you, I’m still an impatient person, but trust me, it’s not as bad as it used to be.

Skill Building

You know how when you get a new car, you start seeing that same model everywhere you go? It’s the same with this. As soon as I started learning the guitar, I heard guitar music everywhere.

And I wanted to learn to play everything I heard. So, to begin with, that’s how I approached learning. I practiced notes and chords and strumming and fingerstyle and Travis picking and… well, you get the picture.

But that’s not the way learning the guitar, or anything else for that matter works. You learn one thing. The open strings or the notes on the first string or just how to hold the guitar. You learn that one thing, and you learn it well. Then you can learn the next thing.

Everything I’ve learned well was learned this way. Everything I’ve learned poorly wasn’t. There are no shortcuts. When I was a programmer, I learned virtually every language that existed back then. But every one began with the ability to display, “Hello World,” on the screen. Later you learned the next thing.

I remember when I taught our daughter how to drive. The first day, she was excited when we got out to the garage, and I let her in the driver’s seat. “Shouldn’t you take me to a parking lot first?”

“We’re not going anywhere yet.”

I had her sit in the car for an hour with the owner’s manual in her lap, learning all the controls and getting used to the feel of them in her hands.

Her joy and gratitude over this simple lesson were boundless.

Oh, wait… you’ve probably met a teenage girl?

As I wrote in another article, I am trying to reboot my photography as this pandemic drags on. So, since I have time, I’m getting back to the basics. Relearn one thing. Then another. Build each skill on the one before it.

In guitar, as in life, you have to learn notes to play melodies to learn songs to perform for others.

One step at a time.

Doing Things for Free

“I’ve been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn and a king.” — Frank Sinatra

Yeah, I know he didn’t write it, but nobody’s ever heard of Kelly Gordon.

I’ve been all of those things at various points in my life, and like Frankie said, “I know one thing.” And that thing is, I rarely did any of them for free.

I’m currently a writer, he says redundantly. I’ve been writing for over fifteen years. I’ve outlined that journey in a couple of pieces. And both of those articles discuss how I started with fiction. I loved writing stories. Being able to project myself through the eyes and lives of fictional characters gave me a lot of joy.

But not much money.

So, I’ve spent most of my time and energy writing non-fiction. Once again, my retirement, coupled with this pandemic, gave me plenty of time to write, practice my photography, and learn the guitar.

One of the many reasons I picked up a guitar was meeting one of my new neighbors. He is a professional musician. One day while out on a walk, I bumped into him, and he asked me how my guitar was going. I reminded him I had only been at it for two months, but that I was pleased with my progress. He invited me to come over one day and play with him. Then he said something that astonished me.

“As soon as you can strum a few chords, I’ve got some gigs you can sit in on.”

It had never occurred to me in my wildest dreams that I would ever earn a nickel from playing the guitar. As far as my fantasy went, playing for a few neighbors would be the pinnacle of my playing career.

Then, I realized that I couldn’t say the same thing about anything I had ever devoted that much time to. Even distance running, something I spent many hours on in my youth held dreams of Olympic competition and corporate sponsorship. I never quite made it that far, but it fueled my training for years.

But a response to one of my articles from one of my loyal readers Patricia Rosa reminded me of something. I’m retired now, and I don’t really need the money. Thinking that, much less saying it out loud goes against a lifetime of working and saving, but it’s true.

Playing the guitar pleases me. I derive happiness, even joy from making music come from that soundhole. So, why not let that spill over into other areas of my life? Maybe, I can dust off my old fictional characters and see if they still have life in them.

Adaptability

We humans are very adaptable creatures. I have seen that time and time again in my life. But nothing has driven that fact home like this pandemic. People were adapting to a new way of life and did so remarkably quickly. Companies are creating new practices and products based on the needs created by the virus.

Well, maybe not toilet paper companies, but everybody else.

And I have seen this adaptability manifest itself in my playing. In the three months since I started, I’ve changed directions several times. I’ve adapted to the knowledge I have gained about the guitar and myself.

For instance, I can’t sing.

So, early on, I decided that learning how to strum chords, while a valuable building block in my musical journey, wasn’t a destination. Visions of me entertaining a group around a campfire playing a tune and singing Neil Young songs, dissolved into images of me scaring children and small animals.

So I adapted.

I explored lead guitar and power chords for a while. But that still implied playing in a band or accompanying someone.

Finally, I settled on fingerstyle solos. And while much more complicated than other genres, it gave me something I could aspire to. No singing, no band, just me and a guitar and a melody.

And so, I have found that this adaptability and my newfound patience have helped immensely during these curios times. The virus has impacted virtually every aspect of my life, but flexibility has made it tolerable.

The Simple Things

Ahh, simplicity. It’s so…. simple. Yet, for most of my life, it has eluded me. I like complicated. I loved programming and video games. I like doing everything all the time. Fast and furious.

Well, maybe quick and mildly agitated.

But the guitar has changed that.

And with the pandemic, it couldn’t have come at a better time. The pleasure of making a single note. A single chord progression played slowly. Making a familiar melody with the fingers of my hands. Simple things.

This has helped immensely during this time. A walk around the neighborhood with my bride or a neighbor. Making a nice lunch instead of going to a restaurant every day. Finding things I can do at home that don’t require anything but a bit of time. Simple things.

With patience, adaptability, and my ability to build on my skills, my music will get more complicated. But I hope that no matter what type of tunes I end up playing and how complicated the music is, I will always find joy in a quiet melody.

The simple things.

One thing I’ve learned in my life is that everything is an iterative process. You do this and become better at that, which gives you the skill and knowledge to tackle that other thing.

But I would never have thought that time spent with this piece of spruce and steel would have given me so much insight into the rest of my life.