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Hello @OhWowMan ;
Well, it’s late and I wanted to get to some song writing before bedtime. But then I saw all the “community support” topics. My first thought was, I’ll take a look at them tomorrow. But I read down the list. Yours caught my attention. Why? Well, because we all face the same thing, feeling stuck, or whatever you wanna call it.
You see, learning guitar is difficult. And even after we learn how to play guitar, we wonder if we “really” know how to play guitar, because there’s so much to it. Ok, Tommy Emmanuel knows how to play guitar. Does anyone else?
Then, throw in a little bit of doubt about why we do it in the first place, and we feel “stuck”. What do it do?
So, let’s start with the obvious. All those beginners… wait a minute, what beginners. That’s ridiculous. A beginner is someone with little to no knowledge, skill and experience. All those instructors who call us beginners are full of shit and just trying to get students so they can pay their rent. You don’t have to be Tommy Emmanuel to be a guitar player. We are guitar players. And we are not beginners. We aren’t the best. We aren’t the worst. We aren’t the newest. We simple are guitar players. Period.
Ok, now, why?, why do we play guitar? Because we love the guitar. Yeah, but do we love it enough to put up with how hard it is to learn and how much we STILL don’t know and can’t do after all this time?
Well, now, that is the question, actually. That’s it right there. @Fletch said it straight away: what gives you joy with your guitar? Pursue that and cultivate it. Don’t ever forget that you will get better so you will need to find ways to keep challenging yourself and improving.
But it’s a long journey. And the key is to have fun and do it for the love of it. But sometimes we just get “stuck”. So what do we do? We look at the “community support” questions and when we find one that asks for help with their guitar journey, we answer it even though it’s late. Why?
Because we all get stuck and this is what gets us unstuck: to tell someone else how to have joy and purpose in their guitar journey. Or we can just write a song about how we love our guitar. It’s already been done a number of times. “This Old Guitar” by John Denver for example. Or write it down in a journal.
So, now, you tell me why you play guitar and put up with this frustration and doubt. What is your purpose? Because when you get clear on that, you’ll be fired up again.
My purpose? To write songs. And specifically, write songs to help me process my emotions. I’ve written the first dozen and I’m working on the second dozen. So I gotta go.
MG 😀