One More Step...

So... I started guitar lessons...

I'm learning the notes, chords, finger positioning, the works.  I've got a book titled "Beginning Guitar: for adults" and I'm ready to go.  It's a weird feeling starting something like guitar lessons were you're an adult. I mean, the kid who has lessons before me is nine years old... nine!  Mom's not hear to tell me to practice but I'm sticking to it and I call tell, with time, I might make it through the book.

I've always wanted to know how to play guitar.  I played around with it for the better part of ten years.  I learned some chords, tried to teach myself, but I never made it over the hump of actually knowing what I was doing.  I never had the confidence to ask for help and with each year that passed, I felt a little too old to be starting lessons.

But somethings have changed this year.  It's been a year of life changing experiences that have gone against the vision of what I thought my life would look like.  I've lost some things and people that were very important to me and I've realized that the only things that I can control are my faith and the way I react in each situation I'm in.  I grew tired of waiting for my life to work out and hoping that it is everything I dreamed it would be.  I grew tired of disappointment, confusion and waiting.

So I made a decision.  My first lesson I was clumsy, my figures hurt and Benjamin, my teacher, didn't have a book appropriate for my age level so he had to write out, by hand, what we were going to play.  I had to cancel my second lesson because of the death of my grandma so by the third week I had hardly practiced, my figures still hurt but now I had a book!  Things went well, I sucked, but progress is being made.

And really, that's the whole point, progress was being made.  It doesn't have to happen overnight.  It doesn't have to be completed or settled all at once.  Little by little progress is being made.  I'm up to learning the notes on the 5th string and while I'm clumsy and my fingers don't quite know where they are going yet, I'm better than I was last week and my fingers don't hurt as much.

It's about taking a step. One step, then another, then another, then another, until you're in a whole new place!  It might not be what you had planned for, but it's where you are and probably where you're supposed to be.  So use it, learn from it and take another step.

When I started guitar lessons, like anything new, I was nervous.  But now, only a month later, I'm excited.  Excited to be trying something I've always wanted to do.  Excited to be good at it.  Excited to have something to work for and earn.

But more than all for that, excited to take another step...