A few weeks ago I pulled my guitar from behind the coats in the front closet of my house. It had been ten years since I’d even held my guitar, but I seldom get any good writing done after midday, and I was looking for something else to do on cold winter afternoons.
I expected my playing to be lousy (it was), but I couldn’t even tune the instrument properly. Each time I gave any one of the tuning pegs even the smallest turn, there’d be a sudden “twang” as the string jumped from slightly flat to slightly sharp. Then when I eased back on the peg, the string would return to slightly flat. I should have gone out and bought a new set of strings, but decided that I would wait to see whether I was serious about playing again. If I was only going to dabble for a week or two before putting the guitar back in the closet, a few hertz one way or the other wasn’t going to make much difference.
The other day when I couldn’t get two of six strings tuned exactly right, I realized that my guitar was a metaphor for all of 2025. By that I mean that it is not just my musical instrument that’s been off. For the past twelve months, my entire life has felt slightly out of tune.
I can’t, however, put my finger on the exact problem. While many other people have suffered major setbacks in 2025, my life has progressed largely undisturbed. The cost of Manyu’s and my health insurance took a jump, but we can afford it. Manyu is foreign-born, but I don’t worry that Homeland Security will prevent her from coming home after her trip to Asia. Climate change has decimated dozens of islands and coastlines, but I live in an inland community that has yet to be hit by a natural disaster.
Still I sometimes complain.* If my biggest problems in life are a guitar that won’t stay in tune, a snow plow that has taken a swath of turf out of my front yard, and an old dog that’s forgotten he was once housebroken, then I don’t really have any problems at all. To a large extent, my entire life has been this easy, and one of the big questions I’ve always had is how much should I seek a peaceful life away from the troubles of the world and how much should I dig in and try to make a difference.
When I started this blog, my plan was to write about the calluses on my fingertips from playing guitar. How did I get here?
* One of my favorite lines in all of rock music is from Joe Walsh’s song Life’s Been Good. In it, he sings, “I can’t complain, but sometimes I still do.”
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