Picking up the guitar again
The guitar sat in the corner of the bedroom for nearly two years, leaning against the wall at a slight angle with a thin film of dust on the body and the strings going slowly dead. I'd walk past it every day and think, vaguely, that I should do something about it. I didn't.
I'd played fairly seriously in my mid-twenties — nothing impressive, just folk songs and a handful of picked fingerstyle pieces I'd learned from books. Then life filled in around it and the guitar moved corners a few times and at some point the habit was simply gone. What stopped me from starting again wasn't lack of interest but a particular flavour of reluctance that I've noticed in other lapsed skills: the awareness that I'd have to be bad at something I used to be decent at, and that being bad at it would feel worse than never having started.
In February I took the guitar down and put fresh strings on it. My calluses were completely gone. The first evening I played for about twenty minutes before my fingertips gave up. I worked through some basic chord shapes I half-remembered and found, to my surprise, that my hands knew more than my memory did. Muscle memory is strange like that.
Six weeks on I'm playing for half an hour most evenings, which I didn't expect to sustain. I've relearned two of the pieces I used to know and I'm slowly working through a third. I won't be as fluent as I was — I've accepted that — but fluency isn't really the point. The point is having something that asks for attention in a quiet, daily way, something that responds when you give it time and gets away from you when you don't.
I moved the guitar from the corner to a stand beside the desk. It turns out that a thing you can see is a thing you actually play. This seems obvious and I'm not sure why it took me so long to figure it out.