Allowing the guitar to take up time and space in my life again wasn’t a decision. It happened slowly. In 2017 I discovered that my job had taken over my life in a way that could only be described as “unhealthy” and I needed a way to purge the stress of the daily grind. So much frustration was building up with no way to discharge it and it became clear to me that I needed to find a hobby. With a pile of instruments lying around in plain sight, why didn’t I return to the instrument that I love so much? That’s a very complicated question with no simple answers.

It came down to the fact that, as a failed conservatory trained performance major, I felt that I had to be good at the guitar. This is something that is antithetical to a hobby. A hobby, simply put, is something that we do to unwind. It is a purely recreational pursuit and being particularly good at it is not a requirement as long as it is enjoyed. One also must be able to put it down the very second that the enjoyment stops with no repercussions. In no uncertain terms: it can’t matter outside of the joy derived from doing it.

This all sounds simple enough and could be applied to the guitar if I didn’t have such an attachment to the instrument and if I didn’t require myself to be more than proficient. In short, I hold myself to a standard that is unreasonable for this stage of my life and that means that I can’t really play the guitar as a hobby. Not the solo guitar, at least. I’m sure I could have a great time in a dad band playing covers of The Tragically Hip or The Police, but that’s not what I’m doing (today).

With my life more balanced and in a place where I could devote what felt like adequate time to the guitar, I found myself picking through the repertoire. Flipping through my old books. Checking in on notes from teachers and thinking deeply about playing in a way that I wasn’t ready for when I was 19. I may not have the pure chops today, but I do have some life experience to bring to bear now. So I very slowly picked up the instrument again and started with the 120 right hand exercises by Guiliani and the Segovia scales. They were tucked neatly into the three ring binder that I’d tossed into a box in 1995 and carted around with me as I moved around the country. We will return some day to the importance of these strange talismans being carried from place to place, waiting for me.

Sitting with the instrument again for a period of time was instructive. The meditative quality of moving my hands and exercising my ears returned almost immediately. I listened to the tone of my fingers on the strings. I heard the slightest squeaks of my left hand. I stopped myself to put the instrument in tune. Taking my time, I focused on making the scales and arpeggios as accurate as I could make them for a given tempo and create the best tone that I was able to produce. There was no one else in the room. It was the guitar and me, like so many years ago. I hadn’t forgotten how to practice. I had abandoned my Practice.

Practicing is part of a practice. Well, it’s part of this Practice. Working with simple goals in front of me each session, I make my way through a static regimine that could be described as a ritual. I center myself with the instrument. I get comfortable in my chair. I tune and retune and then I check my fingernails to make sure that they are in good order. There is focus on the details because the details are everything. With body and instrument ready, it starts with right hand exercises and scales. Slowly, the tempo increasing with regularity, the exercises are mixed and matched until everything is clicking.

With the warm-ups out of the way, I work on a given piece. Which piece? It depends. Some days I want to polish something that is going well. Other days I know that I need to take a piece to the woodshed and grind until I get it moving in the right direction. There are sessions dedicated to memorizing the music. Other sessions for working out fingerings and technical details for a piece I might want to learn or read through. What these different sessions sound like to the people in my home who wander by my open office door as I practice, I can’t say. I’m sure that none of these sessions sound perceptibly different from one another. But that’s The Point.

The Practice is for me.

The Practice is me sitting with the instrument and working to push myself forward with the understanding that I am running my own race. I am alone in the practice room. There is no commpetition here. Working toward my improvement on the instrument is for me. It’s not selfish, but it’s not for anyone else. I do it to improve a part of me that I find important; something that means a great deal to me. And I do it to see if I might make some music. Making music is distinct from performing. Explaining that position is going to be an essay of its own for another time.

These are all things that are done but what is important is that they are done with regularity and discipline. My Practice takes at least an hour a day (usually more) and is a part of my daily routine. It happens most days barring family obligations or the truly unavoidable work that comes with life. It is regular. It occupies time.

Most importantly, the Practice improves me. Giving myself time and space to work on something that is of great importance to me makes me a better person. It teaches me things about myself. I learn patience and perseverance. I stretch myself in ways that only I can see. I open myself to a deeper way of thinking. I make a place for a kind of joy that can only come from the art of music. In this way, my Practice is a deliberate application of skill, effort, and time to improve myself through the pursuit of Music.

That is my Practice.