Salut Les Amis! It’s been a curious stretch of days — the kind where time seems to move both too quickly and not at all. Between rehearsals, edits, and the slow administrative crawl that accompanies anything creative, I’ve found myself oddly content. The work feels alive again, which is all one can really ask for.

In any case, a meaningful update follows. An essay that captures the emotions and conclusions from the past month.

(or, How to Stop Mistaking Tedium for Failure)

There’s a private, stubborn voice that keeps interrupting my practice: this is a waste of time.
It appears most insistently when I slow the metronome down, when I hold a triad for six bars and listen to every imperceptible wobble, when a simple arpeggio that should be obvious collapses on contact.

That voice tells me I should be doing something real—making records, playing gigs, proving something. Not sitting alone, repeating the same triads like a lab rat testing its own patience.

But beneath that irritation is something smaller and truer: fear. Fear that if I don’t already have the thing I want, I never will. Fear that the gap between who I imagine myself to be and what I can currently play is permanent. And that fear, I am beginning to realize, is doing more damage to my hands and ears than any technical flaw ever could.

Motivation is not what I thought it was. I used to imagine it as a kind of divine energy—something that arrives fully charged after a good gig or a new song idea. A switch flipped by external validation.

But it isn’t that. Motivation, when it actually shows up, is usually a byproduct of manageable action. A small, repeatable success that makes the next day’s practice slightly less unbearable.

When those micro-successes are missing, I confuse the absence of feeling progress with the absence of progress itself. I assume I’m stuck because I don’t feel different. But feeling, I’ve come to understand, is a slow and unreliable currency. Neural rewiring happens invisibly. The system improves even when the ego refuses to notice.

My aversion to slow tempos isn’t just impatience; it’s existential.
Slowing down exposes weakness. It forces me to confront the tiny imbalances I otherwise gloss over—the rushed articulation, the shaky shifts, the lazy pick angle.

It’s uncomfortable because it disrupts identity. Who am I if I can’t play basic changes cleanly? The imagined version of myself—fluent, fluid, assured—evaporates under the microscope of tempo 40 bpm.

This is where avoidance begins. I resist slow practice, or worse, I fake it. Then I plateau, confirm my suspicion that it’s all pointless, and the loop resets.

The remedy, unromantic as it is, remains what every teacher since time immemorial has said: you have to go slow.
Riyaz, the disciplined daily repetition, exists for a reason. The nervous system demands consistency more than heroics. It is the most boring kind of magic—incremental, invisible, and infallible.

The paradox is that slow work, done patiently, is the only reliable accelerator for expressive freedom. The invisible work is the visible work, just delayed in revelation.

When I can’t play a triad cleanly, three problems overlap:

If proficiency matters—and it does—then the only honest way forward is patience plus a plan. Feynman’s advice applies as much to jazz as it does to physics: study hard what interests you the most in the most undisciplined, irreverent, and original manner possible.

That line allows for contradiction: I can spend months on triads and still make records. The triads are a foundation, not a prison.

There are, thankfully, some practical ways out of the loop:

There’s a particular humiliation in being caught at the basics. The imagined self hates being revealed as a beginner. But shame is a narrowing force—it contracts possibility. Curiosity, by contrast, opens it.

The better story is not I am failing but I am in the middle of a process.
That framing keeps pressure on the work, not on my sense of worth. It lets me be rigorous without cruelty.

If mastery is the goal—and I suspect it is—it will never be the reward of inspiration. It will be the reward of stamina. Of showing up when it feels like nothing is changing.

Riyaz demands endurance, as does any rigorous art. The invisible days compound. The micro-corrections accumulate. Eventually, what once felt like tedium becomes fluency.

So I’ll slow the f*** down, lean into the discomfort, and trust that the invisible gains are the real ones.

with peace and insight,

-Ameya :)