Let's Jam?

Time to make a switch in tone from urgent confessional to self- deprecation. What more perfect venue to make fun of myself than my guitar lesson?  To begin with, I had a haircut right before my lesson yesterday and went in to the lesson with tiny hairs scattered across the cheekbones on both sides of my face (which I only discovered after leaving, when I encountered my scary countenance in the bathroom mirror). I looked like I was growing facial hair in support of Movember!

In class, I had to make my way through the two new songs I learned with such concentration that the fingers on my left hand turned white from pressing down the strings and the tension in my left arm made my trick elbow swell. Relaxed and happy, I was not!

For though I love guitar, it brings out all of my perfectionist, rigid qualities. \While those qualities help me practice and focus and move forward, they are also restrictive. When my teacher says, "Let's jam,"  I hear "let's get crazt and make s$#! up!"  That's scary because the creative, plastic connections in my brain seem to have frozen over the last four decades. I have to ask him to show me how, and it feels like asking a child to teach you how to play in the sandbox.

So I need to relax and practice "jamming" which hopefully will help my poetry, and quite possibly will up my smile quotient for the day. Sometimes it feels like I'm going back to the beginning, that I'm aiming to be 8 or 10 years old again, with most of what I've learned since then just excess baggage.