Girl from Ipanema

In order to have a routine and give myself something to do in the evening besides watching tv, I have been retreating to my bedroom for about an hour each night and work on classical guitar. Although I had been playing acoustic guitar since I was a teenager, I took up the study of classical guitar less than ten years. It was interesting because I had to learn things like reading music and working on timing, although I never got very good at either. Still, it is something I have kept at on and off over the years. If asked to rate myself, I would probably put myself at a low intermediate level which, given the pure number of years since I started learning is probably pretty pathetic but accurately reflects the amount of effort I’ve put into the activity.

When I practice, I do so not so much to make progress as to simply enter a different state of mind. I can feel when I am practicing another, nonverbal side of the brain is kicking in and the verbal side can get a rest. Since I am not very good, practice can be a slow, rather painful process as getting through even a few bars can take hours. So it is almost as if I practice out of a sense of duty more than out of love for the classical guitar: duty to be doing something constructive with my time, a sense that I ought after all these years to make progress on the instrument or at least maintain what little progress I have made. Passion or excitements are not words that come to mind when I think of how to describe my nightly ritual.

All of that changed the other night as the result of a web search. I usually practice in front of the computer screen because there is a wonderful website—learnclassicalguitar.com—that offers great free lessons. I cannot call to mind the precise reason why I decided to do a web search for “Girl from Ipanema.” I know that about ten years ago I saw classical guitarist Christopher Parkinson perform a version of this live, and it blew me away. Hoping to find a version of the song I could play, I was delighted to see a youtube video claiming to give a lesson on the song. Almost immediately I was hooked. For one, it did not look that hard to play, but the level of difficulty made in interesting and required a good deal of effort. Just coordinating the fingering patterns and chords for the first couple of bars took me the rest of the session that night. By that time I was hooked. I was working on the song not for one hour but two or three each evening, and pulling out the guitar in the morning and afternoons just to brush up.

This I thought is what passion is like. This is how you should do everything. When you approach something with this state of mind, everything changes. I’ve done this before with the classical guitar, working for hours on a Gymnopedie #1 by Satie, a piece that is levels above my ability but which I learned simply because I loved the piece. So what I am saying is that it is important to have this kind of passion in all aspects of your life. And it is this lack of passion for my academic work that played a role in my leaving the position. How to get it and how to harness it, however, remains a mystery to me. In the case of the guitar, I could not just have consciously decided that I was going to love Girl From Ipanema. I just loved that song, and without things calling you in that way, you are never going to develop the passion. And this, as I say, is an element beyond our conscious control.

So those things have to be out there and then we have to identify them, which is a whole separate process, because if they are out there and we never find them, well, it is like a lover we never meet. But unless you are out there looking, you will never meet the lover. So you have to be out there looking for things you love, and probably finding a lot of things you don’t love and playing with them anyway, both in lovers and in classical guitar music and in everything. Finally, if it is out there and you identify it, then you must act on that passion, engage it in some meaningful way.

I’m sure this all applies to my life in someway. But right now I’m too busy working on this song to figure that out.