When quarantine started, I saw it as a nice break from school and life. However, that mindset only stayed with me for less than a month; within a matter of days, I went from my newfound relaxed, lazy state, into a state of emergency where I felt that I had to be constantly doing something that I saw as productive to make up for the time I wasted. This is clearly not a healthy lifestyle, but I was unable to find anything else worth doing, so it continued this way for months.

 At the beginning of quarantine I occasionally practiced on my fathers old acoustic guitar, but I was only able to play a few chords. I would play every couple days and it was the only thing I really enjoyed, but I just wasn’t motivated enough to do it on my father’s old guitar. I slowly fell back into the rut of always being stressed out and feeling guilty whenever I was not doing something I deemed productive enough. This is what made the day I got my first guitar such a special day. Picking up that guitar and bringing it home was enough to release me from the stressful, unhealthy pattern I had been stuck in for months. 

It was two weeks before Christmas and my father’s father, the only wealthy person in my family, was informed by my father that I wanted a guitar for Christmas. The next wednesday, I had just finished school and intended to get working on my spanish homework when my father came into my room and told me to get my shoes on. I figured that he wanted me to drive up to the end of the gravel road to get the garbage can that I put out the night before. But then he told me exactly what was going on. When he told me that I was getting an electric guitar, I had split feelings on it. I was obviously ecstatic to get a guitar and learn all of the songs that I loved to listen to, but another part of me was worried that this would be a waste of money on something that would just be a waste of time if I wasn’t good at it.

But when I got to Guitar Center and started trying out guitars, all the worries I had started to disappear. While I tried out quite a few guitars, one just felt right the whole time. This marbled blue Fender guitar just felt right. It sat well on my leg, the neck rested well in my hand, and it sounded exactly how I wanted a guitar to sound. It was the obvious choice and it was on sale to the point that it was well within budget. While I am not usually a very materialistic person, this guitar became a prized possession that I would pick up and put down far too softly for several days.

It’s unlikely that I’ll even ever play in a band or ever play in front of people, but the future is irrelevant to the importance of this day to me because this day brought me out of the rut I was in. It showed me that there’s more to life than just productivity. I went home with that guitar and realized that it is important for me to do things that I enjoy. That day I realized that I didn’t have to always do something to be successful, it’s just as important for me to do something fun that won’t affect my life, like playing my new guitar.