My wife and I went out for drinks with some friends at Chelbys last Saturday night. As our tab grew in girth, Liz looked at me across the table and grinned. “Are we going to have band practice when we get home?” she asked. 

I rolled my eyes, more for the histrionic effect than actual irritation. 

You see, Liz’s friend Heather bought her a tambourine for her birthday a few weeks ago—a selfless act of gift giving that I will be sure to repay Heather for at some point in the near-future—and since getting her tambourine, my wife has made learning to play the instrument her raison d’etre. 

Liz frowned at my eye roll. “Are we going to have band practice, or not?” she asked. 

“Sure,” I said, not having the heart to disappoint her. “We can have band practice.” 

Since getting the tambourine, it has become a vessel for Liz’s happiness, and although she is still basically just slapping and shaking the thing right now, she is trying to learn something new, proving that it is never too late to learn. 

When we have “band practice” in our basement, Liz tries to play the tambourine, and I try to play the acoustic guitar. The main difference is that I’ve been playing the guitar—off and on—since my late-teens and haven’t improved much in the last few decades. 

Let me be blunt here: If I were any good at playing the guitar, there is little-to-no chance that you would be reading this right now because there is little-to-no chance that I would’ve become a writer.  

I started writing after realizing that I would never be any good at music. I have a stilted sense of rhythm, my timing is terrible, and I possess little-to-no ability to put words to a tune. But I started playing guitar for the same reason men do anything: to impress women. 

When I realized that I wasn’t going to go far in my musical endeavors—I was never going to be a rock star fighting off groupies with a whip and a stool—I started to explore poetry and stories. As it turned out, I intuitively knew how to write these things. The sentences made sense in ways that the notes never did for me. 

And I didn’t need a lot of rhythm to write well. 

However, it doesn’t mean that I don’t enjoy playing the guitar. I’m just not very good at it. But you don’t have to be good in order to practice making art, and our Saturday night band practices are about practicing art.

The late-author Kurt Vonnegut perfectly captured this sentiment. “Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake,” Vonnegut wrote. “Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

While Liz and I will likely never leave our basement or play for a live audience, it doesn’t matter. We’re making our souls feel full through the act of creation. 

I kept missing chord changes, and Liz struggled to keep 4/4 time on the tambourine, but it didn’t matter—not one iota. Our band is likely to improve if we keep practicing, and why not keep at it? We have nothing to lose, and everything to gain.

Besides, looking at the size of our tab last Saturday night¹, it was impressive that we even found our instruments. 

1. Fear not, we took an Uber home. ↩︎