What did I learn from my time in quarantine? How to play the mandolin. Sort of. I need a lot more practice.

To be fair, I already knew “Winder Wie Ist” fairly well. But learning “Mach auf, mein” and “Ay, Deus, se sab’ora meu amigo” were highlights of those three weeks.  And the process of learning those songs and others, picking up an instrument I hardly knew and strumming until I figured it out, taught me more than a few minutes of music.

Like Gill, I’m an aspiring author. I try to write often, though being in the excruciating editing phase of creating a novel has caused me to spend much less time on it. What do I do with free time when not writing? 

Watch a movie or play a video game. Fun things, but not particularly rewarding. 

I spend time with my lovely wife. While I treasure that time, I’m not sure that we’re enriching each other’s lives on a daily basis. Perhaps once we’ve had children. 

Making children, now that’s a fun endeavor, but the result has a long waiting period. And ends in diapers. I can’t wait for it and probably can’t wait for the first few years to be over.

What does it get you, trying to spend your time more fruitfully? I experienced a prescient example about six months before COVID-19 hit. Before playing the mandolin I had tried the violin, a much more difficult instrument. I went to dinner at a friend’s place, and the man’s teenage daughter was talking about quitting orchestra in school, where she played violin. The father seemed unconcerned, whether she quit or had ever played, and I felt compelled to stop the entire conversation to lecture him on the challenges she’d overcome up to that point. After 18 months of regular practice and thousands of dollars in private lessons, I couldn’t produce a short song entirely in-tune. The girl commiserated with me, saying that it had taken her several years to reach that point, and that she was only going to stop formal practice, but would continue to play on her own.

I’m not much sure that I moved the father, or that it was my words that convinced the daughter not to give up entirely, but I did think that I may have nudged the father’s girlfriend’s opinion of her future step-child in a helpful way. I could not have made this meaningful connection without the shared experience of playing the same instrument. And the girl’s words of encouragement likely influenced me to try again, which might have been with my violin were it not an ocean away in climate-controlled storage. 

People spend time in many ways and kill it in many more. But trapped in our house, casting about for some meaning to the days, I relearned the old lesson that time spent improving yourself is the most fulfilling. Learning something, or teaching something, usually tends to include a lesson about one’s self. Our lives are better, and the world is better, when we search our souls and find some understanding with which to fill our hearts, and perhaps spill over into the hearts of others.

I don’t think wisdom leads to happiness, but I do feel that it’s much harder to be unhappy when you invest your time and energy into something that becomes part of you. Music, for instance. Culture, art or literature of course. Self-reflection, which leads eventually to kindness and empathy.

The world needs a lot more of those right now, but they do not spring from words on the internet, however arranged or by whatever medium disseminated. They flow freely only from a calm, steady heart, so enriched that it has love to share.

I’ve heard a surprising number of stories about families and couples struggling to cope with the close quarters of quarantine. My wife and I came out perhaps even stronger together. After all, she did learn the patience to listen to me strum the same dozen songs over and over. 

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