Growing Up

Judging from my own experiences, I have never appreciated art like I do today even though I get impatient at times with whatever I'm engrossed in reading or watching or listening to. And this comes from the two and a half years I've spent trying to become a better musician which I don't consider to be quite a significant period of time, but it has, nonetheless opened up my ears to so many more things, that I can barely begin to explain. Tiny little things like the phrasings that Vai does here and there or the emotionally drenched vocals of Thom Yorke on 'In Rainbows' or even my friend, Jeet's solos which have so much character to them that they leave a song incomplete if left out, eluded me a few years ago. Then there are things that I can't even quite put into words, but which I'm sure every good listener catches.

But I'm not a good listener. I'm impatient and I get bored too easily. But the important part being, three years ago I didn't even understand what I was listening to. I didn't understand art myself. Sure I could differentiate between what sounded good to me, overall, and what sounded bad, but that was as far as I got. It was a wall of sound hitting me unlike the individual notes that I manage to hear today.

This fact is the sole reason why I regret not being taught art in school. I had to wait 18 years until I discovered what creativity really meant. And then I was brought out to a whole realm of new ideas and new possibilities. I discovered a whole new reflection in the images I was already familiar with. There is more to a photograph than the colours; there is more to a movie than what you see; there is more to music than the sound; there is more to individuality than a definition.

And while I try to figure these things out, I pity the fact that most people miss out on so much simply because no one bothered to teach them about art. But that's from an incomplete education that most schools these days give out. I never had music classes in school. I didn't even know what the heck 'Kubrick' meant. It was only by a matter of coincidence that I happened to go to college with a fellow guitarist. Who knows what would have happened to me otherwise. I probably would've never grown out of that box.

The point of this post being the same as most of my other posts: try new things. The more you expand your sensory perceptions, the more you broaden your take on life. Would an illiterate person really understand a good book? It doesn't matter if he can see, just like it didn't matter three years ago that I could hear.

Music's made me grow as a person not only as an artist. And if two and a half years can do so much, I wonder what a decade might do or even a lifetime.