Boredom is my friend

I won't practice. I've tried, really I have. I say "this time will be different", and I "commit" to an hour a day, or a half-hour a day. I pick up my beginner's level books (Mel Bay for guitar, or Alfred's Adult for keyboard), and hop to it. Sometimes I make it a month, once or twice I've made it two or three. More often than not, I make it a week. This has happened at least once or twice a year for my adult life.

I just won't practice.

But the fact that I come back to it year after year tells me that something is going on between me and music. I can't just put it away. Something in me wants to make music.

Without getting too self-psychoanalytical, I think I try to bite off way too much at a time, and I think I've missed the mark in the past with my efforts. Rather than "learning to play an instrument", followed at some point by "then creating with that instrument", I'm instead going to just get my hands on the instrument (primarily keyboard, but perhaps guitar as well) very regularly. Hopefully daily, but if not quite that often, oh well. Make something up. Play around. No time limits, just make sure I'm there.

And then, I'm gonna get bored.

But it'll be a flavor of boredom that will make me curious about what else I can do. I will have run out of things that I know how to do, and will go looking for more. What little bit can I learn that'll make it a little bit interesting again. (Which will be a different kind of boring than the old, familiar "oh great, I've got to do scales AGAIN", which after a week or three, makes me want to scream.)

This happened this morning. Many years ago, a keyboard teacher taught me a blues scale. Pretty darn hard to play those 5 or 6 notes and make them sound bad. So for the past couple of weeks, I've been sitting down and playing the blues scale up and down the keyboard. And it's gotten pretty boring. So this morning, I did it again, only trying to figure out what else to put in there. I didn't come up with anything worth writing down, but I started jumping around a bit more, and threw in a few extra notes, just to see what they'd sound like. (Mostly, like crap, but here and there, I had a few happy mistakes.) So now I'm off and running again.

And in a few more days, when I get bored again, I might just try modulating from C to F or G, and see what that sounds like for a week or two.

Anyway, the point is to use my boredom as a wedge to get my brain to loosen up and have fun. To me, playing other peoples' music isn't that fun; making my own looks like a blast, and on those rare moments when I make up something interesting, it *IS* a blast.

So yes, boredom, or at least the right kind of boredom, is my friend. A gentle force to nudge me onward, and to remind me that I should be having fun. Because without that fun, I'll be done with this in a week.