Destructive Progress

A Harmonica Player's Thoughts on Craft

“I wonder why progress looks so much like destruction.”
-John Steinbeck, Travels with Charley in Search of America

Getting good at anything is a long, unfolding process of losing yourself.

The longer you play, the less of “you” that was there before remains. Just like we leave bits and pieces of ourselves when people we love die or we move to a different city, the act of creation, of creating a new “you” (which is what progress ultimately is), involves tearing down the walls and foundations that held us up before we realized we must evolve.

Getting better is not so much about what you learn as what tendencies and bad habits you discard along the way. As I got better at the harmonica, I found that what was most challenging was not learning new licks but unlearning the muscle memory of my previous self. One of the things that can trap us as harmonica players is the ease of a comfortable sound. There is only growth in continuous acts of unmaking, relearning, and unlearning. We are never a completed draft, just bits of scribbled paper, crossed-out words, and rewrites for a version that never comes.

The need for perfection becomes the ultimate destruction.

We must always be cognizant not just of where we’re headed, but what we are leaving behind to get there. When I was in my early 20’s, I was a shithead. I was strung out on ease; alcohol, drugs, lying, avoiding responsibility, a lusty little boy obsessed with romantic ideas of creativity and hell-bent on unknown methods of self-destruction. I resigned myself to this spiral, not sure of what the cards of fate had in store for me. Darkness was a good place to be at that age. It taught me valuable lessons. My previous self, that shithead with a peach fuzz beard and sunken-in eyes, taught me what I needed to leave behind, what I had to destroy, in order to become who I am today.

So many of us resign our lives to the past, either wishing those previous selves could take our current place or wishing we had a time machine. The destruction of the past and the present creates the progress of tomorrow. As a musician, I look to the past with a keen awareness and sense of gratitude, but also a healthy dose of distance and satisfaction in knowing it is far away, a ghost I can gaze at but no longer be ruled by.

Destruction has something to teach us. In Hinduism, the god Shiva destroys in order to create. What may seem like an all-consuming nightmare in your life might be the greatest thing to ever happen to you, the greatest lesson you never knew you had to learn.

The progress of our lives is measured by how aware and engaged we are with our craft, and craft is only possible through many failed attempts at getting good.

-Shane