November 2025 update: all posts in this series now have enhanced semantic navigation. You can browse all related posts in this specific topic and even have a hub page, from where you can see all of them.

This update comes 5 days after the regular date, which is 23rd of the month, but for good reasons: I’ve been traveling and I simply didn’t have access to my guitar while I was away.

For more than two thirds of the last month I’ve been on the road. That means for more than two thirds of the last month I couldn’t play, and I was only able to touch my guitar just 4 days ago.

It was intense.

First of all, I had no idea it’s so easy to forget, if you don’t practice. I literally struggled to remember even songs that I was playing with my eyes closed, like “Spanish Romance”.

Second, I felt so relieved when something remotely looking like a melody eventually came out from my guitar. Really relieved.

So, as you can imagine, today update is not very consistent, in terms of learning progress. But there is something really important, that I felt the need to share.

And that’s how essential this practice became in less than a year.

If you follow my updates on this topic, you may remember that one of the reasons I started to learn to play the guitar was almost therapeutical: I needed to add more harmony into my life. After just 3 weeks of not being able to play, I realized how important was that effort. Even if all I did was 10-15 minutes of practice every day, those minutes had a huge impact on my behavior. I may not even realize why I didn’t feel very good, while I was away, but now I know that not being able to play the guitar every day was a big part of it. So, just by not playing the guitar, my overall emotional level slipped to a more stressed level, even if I didn’t consciously linked the stress to the lack of practice.

That’s the bad news.

The good news is that I will restart my regular practice in just a couple of days. By the end of this week things should fall into places (“should” is such a cocky word, if you really think about it – there’s nothing in the fabric of reality that “should” be, it’s just our expectation). So, probably, around the May 23rd I should be able to report more on this area.

Really looking forward to that post.