my friend, mr. finger

I've found myself practicing hours of Primaries, especially the "anchor" exercises. The anchor exercises require that you keep one finger fretting a note while the other fingers work through various permutations from the First Primary. The anchor exercises help develop release by preventing you from yanking your fingers away from the fretboard, but I'm working on them right now mainly to help with develop finger strength and stretch.

In particular, my left hand ring finger does a strange little dance; when my hand is relaxed, the ring finger likes to lean against the middle finger and then rotate into place when it comes time to fret a note. This rotational movement wastes a lot of motion, so I'm trying to develop a new habitual muscle balance and strength in that ring finger so that it doesn't lean against the middle finger and stays closer to the strings.

A lot of this finger weakness become obvious when I anchor the middle or the ring finger. The ring finger actually shakes and struggles to stay in position against the sympathetic tension triggered by the other fingers moving.

Gradually, I'm figuring out how to let the fingers relax into position, instead of using tension to hold them in place. The tension state of the pinky also has a lot to with how the middle and ring fingers relate to each other.

I seemed to progress well for the first three or four days, but last night, I felt like I could barely play, and that ring finger would not cooperate if I didn't keep my attention on it at all times. On off days like that, you just do your best.

Otherwise, old friends keep coming out of the woodwork lately, people I haven't spoken to for years and years. They tell me about their lives, and it seems like I never knew them at all. Then again, it's also turning out that scattered intuitions in the deep past were on target all along. At the same time, I'm also finding out how oblivious I was, and that some old friends may still be driven to negotiate delicate matters that, as far as I'm concerned, are settled and no longer open to debate.

New information about old mutual friends also arises, and I must work to hold this new information in balance against what I thought I knew, but not rush to judgments. In this sense, it's hard to hold contradictions; we want everything neatly explained and categorized, but life is messy, and few people manifest the same way to all of their acquaintances. If we're not careful, we can fall prey to a "funhouse mirror" effect and mistake the reflection for the thing itself; instead, I guess we should just toss these new bits into the kaleidoscope and marvel at the ever-changing combinations.

Maybe we are all ultimately unknowable ciphers to those around us. And maybe even to ourselves, unless we make some practice of observation without judgment.