Hallelujah
I was mindlessly strumming my guitar tonight. I was frustrated with a piece of writing, with the fact that I wasn’t doing more writing, with the endless list of to-dos, with the lectures I haven’t watched and the dishes I abandoned in the sink, drowning in their shallow, watery grave. I started strumming “Hallelujah”. It’s one of my favorite pieces of music, and it’s not hard to understand why it gets so endlessly covered. High school a cappella groups have done it. Your favorite metal band has done it. The guy on the corner busking does it once a day and twice on Sundays. And, apparently, so do I. I think people like it so much because it’s simple, yet big enough to fit whatever you’re feeling inside of it.
So I was strumming “Hallelujah”, and almost without noticing, the sound began to change. I’m just at the point of learning guitar where the lines almost sound like songs. I can get the chords mostly get in time if they’re not too complicated, and the strumming is . . . coming along. But I’m always struggling with one or the other. Either I’m struggling to keep the beat, or I’m struggling to move my fingers quick enough to make the chord change. I can consistently do one of those things at a time, if I’m not singing along, but it takes powers of concentration that tonight I did not have. I couldn’t hold so many things at once, the fingers and the dishes and the feeling that I should be doing more than I am. My CPU was overheated, so I was just strumming along to the stuff I didn’t have to think too hard about.
But tonight, I was focusing on how much I was fighting to write, that I didn’t have enough brainpower left over to fight to play. The whole endeavor got more relaxed. My fingers didn’t mind so much if I caught a few errant strings on my way from one chord to the next. I couldn’t panic about it, or stare at my fingers, willing them to do the right thing this time. I couldn’t focus on each of the component parts individually. And in the moment where I gave up on trying to control the whole thing, the whole thing came together. It sounded like music for the very first time.
It took a year of building stubborn calluses and teaching my fingers where to be, but it sounded like music at last. Not just a low-budget reproduction of the tune I loved, but actual, honest-to-God music. Hallelujah, indeed. It sounded so right, I played it again, and sang along when I knew enough to manage it. Then I played another tune, another old favorite, just to see if the magic followed it. It did. I had given up an iota of control over my own process, and was rewarded with music, actual music, as a result.
I needed to let go in order to let the space between the notes show up. When I quit pushing so hard for perfection, my fingers figured out how to hit the right notes at the right time. But in order for that to happen, I had to let go of the notion that there was a right way for this whole thing to go. I had to make room for the magic. Had to make space for the space between.
They say that’s the real challenge when you learn a new skill. You get into it because you like it, whether it’s watercolor or pastry baking or skateboarding. And at first, you’re so excited to be doing the thing that you’re voracious about it. But there’s a moment that comes when you recognize how vast the chasm is between where you are and what you love. This is where most people quit, paralyzed by the size and scale of the difference. The space between them and the people they admire is simply too big. It was like that for me, for awhile. I saw the size of the space ahead of me, and freaked out.
But fairly early on, the guitar became a refuge. A place to go when I don’t want to be good at anything. The place without expectations or goal-setting or the word “should”. It’s where I go to quit living up to expectations, my own included. Everyone needs a place where they can be bad at things. The chasm between where I am and what I could be doesn’t have to be terrifying. I had to learn to let a little chaos into the mix. Had to find the joy in the process. As much as I’d tried to carve out this space to experiment, I’d unwittingly let my own perfectionism back in without noticing.
I’m still a work in progress. I’m still trying to come to the guitar, and to everything else, without the weight of my own expectations in tow. Without feeling like I’m trapped in a vice of my own making, where all the things I should be getting a move on with get in my way of moving at all. But what I found out, distracted and cranky that night, is that I needed that space in the middle. In between the notes, and in between where I am and where I’m going. There’s a resonance in the empty space between where one chord ends and the next begins. There’s chaos, too, for sure. But the joy isn’t in getting it all the way right; it’s in getting it just wrong enough to sound like you and no one else.
The unresolved space is where all of the potential lives. All of the joy of playing your favorite song simply because you can, even if it’s only sort of. All of the music lives in there, too, in the space between, if I’m willing to quit panicking long enough to let it out.
