Monday morning. Issue 4 outline open. Multiple ideas. A fear of losing the thread of the newsletter. Competing directions. The expansion of ideas. Head starting to feel heavy trying to navigate several routes simultaneously.
I'd recently built up awareness of when I was forcing it, and I could feel the agitation increasing.
I stopped. Went and picked up the guitar.
More truth came through the guitar than anything I was trying to write.
I've had a guitar for fifteen years. For fourteen of them I pretended to learn it. Every few years I'd muddle through a tutorial, and not finish it. Was never too long before it was stored away again.
She made a musician out of me.
In February I started differently. One song. John Legend's All of Me. Just the chords I needed for that song. Just the strumming pattern for that song. Pick it up once a day, one minute or thirty. Show up. That's the whole system.
The skill came in stages. Small breakthroughs, then plateaus, then another breakthrough. Until I could play it all, together, and hear it.
Monday I went off-script. Doubled the strumming pattern, instinctively. Sang it without trying to sound like John Legend. Something came through that was mine. A voice inside the song I hadn't found before.
No pressure on the outcome. I wasn't thinking about doing it. I was just doing it.
This is not a guitar story.
It's a story about showing up until the thing becomes yours. Going from doing to being. And about knowing, in anything, when more effort won't give you the answer at that time.
I walked back to the computer. The idea was there. You’re reading it now..
Daniel.