datamusicata

Restringing and tuning my guitar the other day (something that I don’t do as often as I once had to thanks to the Elixir Strings (www.elixirstrings.com) and was struck by the similarities between that humble  activity and the business of living.

Putting on new strings is like starting a brand new life.   Every dead note, unwinding buzz is now gone.   Washed clean, just like a sunny morning after a fresh rain.

Tuning up each string, stretching it out and then fine tuning it to prepare it for playing, is just like what we do to prepare for what we want to do, what we will do, and what we have to do.   It’s an undeniable process that is utterly necessary if we are to move forward; and if we are to play the guitar.

So you get it in tune and you play a song.   We can liken that to a day in your life.   You play the song as best you can, and then, you check the tuning again.    Sure enough, at least one of the strings had drifted a little and you bring in back into harmonic resonance.

That’s the first thing that set me off.   As humans, do we do that after an activity; an event; at days end?    What if we did.  Just did a little check to make certain that we are in tune, and if we are not making the subtle adjustments that will make it so.

With the guitar if you don’t do that, in no time at all the sounds coming out of your guitar are more like impressions of mating cats than music. 

And once it’s way out of tune, it takes a lot of effort and time to bring it back into harmony with itself.   And I suspect it is the same with our lives.  

If we don’t keep a close ear and eye on our lives, they drift out of tune; sometimes so far out of tune that we don’t even know which note is true.   Then we can’t tune it because we have no stable frame of reference.

But checking after each time we play something, each time we do something, we can easily bring all the strings in line and make  music that resonates around the world.

Now here was the final thing that occurred to me.   No matter how many times we bring it into tune, we always have to check and re adjust.  After every song.  

We have to do that with our lives as well.   When tuning the guitar, no one becomes upset because they have to tune it again.   That’s just the way it is and you deal with it with no drama.

See if you can put THAT part in place.   I double dare you.