Work

“There is no way of writing well and also of writing easily. Labor omnia vincit improbus.”

“When ascetics stay in one place for a long time,
they begin to languish, stuck in a mire of sloth and intertia.”


“There is no royal road to learning, no short cut to the acquirement of any valuable art.”

People who come up to me after playing a show somewhere often say that they too want to learn the guitar, and, usually, that they even tried, but they gave it up for one reason or another. Anybody that asks me for a free lesson or two, gets them almost immediately because they actually take no time whatsoever to learn:

1) Play every day: the more the better. If you can only play for 30 minutes, that’s fine, but if you can play for two hours, that’s better. Half of playing guitar is the ability for your fingers to hold down the strings for a long time, and if you don’t play every day the muscles in your fingers atrophy. Nobody thinks about finger muscles.

2) Give it time. Perhaps in 6 years of steady playing, you will be competent. Even if you’re playing it as a hobby for thirty minutes every day, you will be decent enough in a few years. If you’re really serious and play two hours every day, sure, that time will probably reduce, but if after one year you can play a C and a G chord really, really well, you probably don’t understand how far you’ve come…

Most things in this life could probably be boiled down to these two little rules: practice and be patient. As a matter of fact, I personally guarantee that absolutely anybody can learn absolutely any skill with enough practice and patience. Admittedly, we’re dealing in the world of the physical here. By that I mean it might not be possible for anybody to learn the details of string theory or quantum mechanics or neo-materialist literary theories, but if somebody wants to learn how to bake, having had no previous experience with flour or ovens or cutting in butter or anything, with enough time and enough practice, they will eventually be able to bake about anything you could want.
As a matter of fact, I would say that anybody CAN learn about quantum mechanics or string theory or anything else if they are determined to. It might take twenty years of daily effort, but if they want it badly enough, they will get there.
Therein lies the nut, though. Desire is something that we generally consider to be the major player in the world of the physical. I want your body. You want to kiss me. I want to eat delicious food. I want to see something beautiful. I want to learn how to play the guitar. I want to learn to bake. What gets lost in the melee of growth and development that happens as a result of desire transmuted into effort for the acquisition of the desired object(ive) is that desire is mental. What happens when you learn something new or put effort into getting something? The mind expands. The mental world that you have developed for yourself grows in conjunction with the skill or effort required to possess the object petit a.
Sometimes what we think we want has nothing to do with what we really want, and the only possible remedy for such a situation is the attempted acquisition of what we think we want, because only then will we be able to have the truth of our desires.
Oh, let them talk about the constant motion of desire and the inability to ever have what we want, should we decide against ever attempting to acquire our desires, the human experience seems to get lost. Perhaps it is that we have become too accustomed to our inability to have what we desire:
--Beautiful celebrity bodies being paraded on every channel
--Unobtainable automobiles
--Skills obtainable but requiring a lot of effort
--Advertisements for things not everybody can afford
Perhaps we try for a while. We go to the gym. We save up every month. We practice for a while. We play the lottery. But years of failure have taught us all that we can’t get most of the things we desire, so what’s the point in trying?
We are all ascetics. When we languish in our mires of sloth and inertia, our resolve grows weak, and when once resolve is weakened, the dam might as well have already been breached.