Dust, Strings, and a Whole Lot of Humility: What a Forgotten Instrument Taught Me About Starting Over

I found it buried under a pile of old sweatshirts and a broken mic stand — a banjo I bought on a whim at a flea market in 2018 and never actually learned to play. It was dusty, slightly out of tune in a way that felt almost intentional, and the head had this little crack running along the edge that I don't remember happening. I stood there holding it in my hallway for a solid minute, trying to remember why I bought it in the first place.

Then I sat down and started messing with it. And honestly? That afternoon cracked something open in me that years of guitar practice never quite managed to reach.

The Problem With Getting Good at Something

Here's the thing nobody really warns you about when you get decent at your main instrument: competence is comfortable, and comfortable is the enemy of curious. I've been playing guitar for most of my life. I know where my fingers go. I know which chord voicings I reach for when I'm writing in a minor key, which strumming patterns I fall back on when I'm tired, which tunings make me feel like I'm doing something adventurous without actually taking any real risks.

I'm not complaining about that. Muscle memory is a gift. But it's also a kind of cage.

When you pick up something you genuinely don't know how to play — something where your hands have zero roadmap — you can't fake it. You can't coast. Every single sound you make is a discovery, and most of those sounds are terrible, and that's the whole point.

The banjo humbled me in about forty-five seconds flat.

What Beginner's Brain Actually Feels Like

There's a concept in Zen Buddhism called shoshin — beginner's mind. The idea is that approaching something with fresh eyes, free from the assumptions that expertise builds up, lets you see possibilities that a master might actually be blind to. I'm not a philosopher, and I'm definitely not claiming to have figured out Zen. But I'll tell you this: sitting on my couch with that banjo, not knowing a single roll pattern, not knowing where the melody lived on those five strings, I felt something I hadn't felt in years.

I felt genuinely interested.

Not in a "this is fun" way. In a "wait, what happens if I do this" way. That specific flavor of curiosity — the kind that has no agenda, no deadline, no expectation of a finished song — is so rare once you've been making music for a long time. I'd forgotten it existed.

I started recording little voice memos on my phone. Not because they were good. Because I didn't want to lose the weird little accidents I kept stumbling into.

The Accidents Were the Music

One afternoon I was messing around and accidentally played a melody I'd never heard before. It didn't sound like anything I would have written on guitar, because on guitar I never would have landed in that position. My hand just kind of fell there because I was lost. And the melody was strange and a little haunting and completely unlike my usual stuff.

I built a whole track around it. It's one of the pieces I'm most proud of from the last couple years.

That track would not exist if I'd kept the banjo in the closet. It also wouldn't exist if I'd actually learned the banjo properly — taken lessons, worked through a method book, gotten competent. Because competence would have given my hands a map, and the map would have routed me around the beautiful wrong turn that became the song.

I'm not saying don't learn things. I'm saying there's a specific creative value in not knowing, and we throw it away way too fast.

Returning to Gear You've Outgrown (Or Never Grew Into)

After the banjo experience, I started digging through more of my old stuff. There's a cheap Casio keyboard from the early 2000s that I used to mess around with as a kid. A harmonica I bought because I thought it would be easy (it is not easy). A lap steel I borrowed from a friend and never gave back — sorry, Marcus.

Each one of them gave me the same gift: a forced reset. A "you don't know what you're doing, figure it out" energy that my guitar never gives me anymore.

I started keeping a box of these instruments near my writing space. Not to become proficient at all of them. Just to have options for when I feel stuck, when everything I'm playing sounds like me on autopilot, when I need something to shake the creative snow globe.

The Lesson That No Lesson Could Teach

The thing is, I could have paid for banjo lessons in 2018. I probably should have. But I don't think lessons would have given me what five years of neglect did. Those five years meant I came back with zero expectations, zero technique, and zero attachment to sounding good. That combination — that specific cocktail of ignorance and willingness — is almost impossible to manufacture intentionally.

The closet did that. The dust did that. Time did that.

Sometimes the most important creative education isn't the one you seek out. It's the one that's waiting for you when you finally get tired of knowing everything.

If you've got something buried in your garage or shoved under your bed — something you bought with good intentions and then quietly gave up on — I'm not telling you to become a master. I'm telling you to pull it out, sit with it for an afternoon, and let yourself be bad at it.

You might make the best thing you've ever made.