No Promises To Keep

I play guitar for a couple hours a day pretty routinely. The feeling that I’m getting more and more out of it is strong and maybe even growing: I can’t exactly count on getting in The Groove in any given session but it sure happens a lot.

At which point I just seem to be in the background somewhere somehow not exactly watching these well-trained hands on the wires or hearing the wires sing along with various rhythmic movements of my (not so well-trained) body (feet on floor, thumpings of the guitar itself, singing if that applies…) or even feeling these (along with the great throbbing painy goodness in my fingertips)… not so much any of these or even all of them put together but noticing even a certain decision making process at work as if I were somebody else.

Which is a great feeling. Woody Allen claimed somewhere that his greatest regret in life is that he wasn’t somebody else; if this is what being somebody else is like it’s easy to see why. I can even roll up grandiose fantasies of huge adoring audiences while the whole thing goes on without (necessarily) wrecking the Vibe: even the bitch-goddess success can’t defeat real peace of mind evidently.

Because I figure that’s pretty close to what goes on here. The Groove here then stands for the state of mind also reportedly reached through Prayer and Meditation and known by me to be achieved through Literacy. A scientist or new-ager might here refer to brain physiology (probably mentioning “alpha waves”); somebody actually having read it might mention M. Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow.

Whatever. You get it by now. The Groove. Now, about that “decision making process”. We’re taught in The Program to pray “only for knowlege of G-d’s will for us and the power to carry that out”. On this model, The Groove is answered prayer, several times a second. But of course it won’t pay the rent. Because a feast is made for laughter and wine maketh merry but money kills every kind of a buzz there is except love of money. Not just another way of pushing people around but The Law.