This is a typical writing situation for me. Although, yesterday it was clearly too hot for this kind of thing. Jack just lay on my feet instead.
By the time my mother came downstairs at ten I was ready to go back to bed. But I didn’t. I spent the day thinking very strange, muddy thoughts. But wading through all the mud in my brain, I did come across one thought that struck me. I was thinking about playing the bass, which is something that I do a lot these days, and I started to wonder why it is that I love playing the bass so much. I used to think that it’s because I seem to understand the bass, but it’s more than that. I understood how to play the piano and I still didn’t stick with it. What I realized is that every other time I’ve tried to learn music I’ve gone the classical route with sheet music and all the notes and nuances laid out before me. With bass, my mother handed me a bass, told me what each string was and said “go!” I’ve had a little bit of instruction, but mostly I’ve been figuring things out through trial and error and observation of what other bass players do.
Being a musician in a band essentially amounts to a lot of creative problem solving, which is one of my favorite things in the world. I love thinking up unusual ways to do things, so much so that frequently I have a hard time understanding the usual way of doing things. But anyway, learning to play the bass, for me, hasn’t been about learning melodies by rote, but about figuring out where I fit in the greater scheme of the music that all four members of the band are creating. It’s like figuring out an auditory jigsaw puzzle and sometimes it makes my brain hurt and sometimes it makes me want to cry, but rarely do I ever want to pack everything in and give up, because I’m learning that there’s always a solution to the problem that I’m facing I just have to figure out what it is.
I guess that’s what life is all about too. I used to think that you just walked down your set path and life happened to you. That didn’t really work out very well for me, because waiting for life to happen is the surest way to ensure that absolutely nothing happens to you. It took a little while, but I’ve come to realize that just like playing the bass, I have to be an active participant in life for it to happen around me. I have to be creative about life, find my own solutions to my own problems. I think that more than having a real job, more than paying taxes or having car insurance it’s learning to play the bass that has helped me to transition from clueless teenager to ever-so-slightly less clueless adult.
Thank you for reading.
Leave a Reply