I’ve always loved listening to music, but making music has not always been my strong suit. When I was little, my parents put me in piano class with a teacher named Mrs. Mary, and it quickly became my least favorite time of the week. I would leave most lessons crying and needing  candy to make me feel better. What I remember most is Mrs. Mary’s look of disapproval, being scolded for not hitting the right notes and feeling generally ashamed and frustrated (needless to say, not the point of music!).

Piano never quite stuck with me, but recently I’ve picked up the ukulele, and I think I’ve got a better shot at sticking with it.

I love to play the ukulele. I love its sound, its natural charm and its upbeat rhythm. I love learning new chords and trying to play new songs. I love the feeling of doing something with my hands, especially given how much of our work as students happens in our minds. I love the act of creating something that is fleeting — I can’t go back to playing the chorus of a song the same way I can go back to an essay on a Google Doc and continue to make changes. When I make music with the ukulele, the sound just is what it is, and I can’t evaluate or fix it. It exists at a certain moment in time, and then it goes away. So I need to appreciate it while it is there.

Even though I love to play the ukulele, I would not say I am necessarily good at it.

Just ask my roommates. They can hear through the thin walls of our apartment as I struggle to change chord positions in time with the melody and to remember the difference between an E minor and a D minor chord and which one comes before the other in the song I am trying to play. They can hear me playing the same songs over and over to no avail. 

As I write this, I wonder why I understand those two things — my love of playing the ukulele and also considering myself not quite skilled at it — to exist in tension. Can I love something and be bad at it? I think that the answer is yes.

I think it is important to engage in activities that are not about improvement,becoming “the best you can be”or focused on evaluation. So many other parts of life have become this way (school, for example, has in many ways become more focused on grades — an evaluative metric — than the process of learning: the experiential component) that it is easy to feel that this is just the way life is. But it doesn’t have to be this way. 

I deeply enjoy the unstructured manner in which I am able to learn to play the ukulele. I can pick it up when it feels right and I can put it down when I’m finished. The goals and metrics I have in my learning process are ones that I create for myself, not ones that someone is creating and imposing onto me. Unlike the way that I learned piano, I can do it on my own terms without anybody scolding me for messing up. And this frees me to appreciate the actual experience of making music, not because it is something I am good at but because it is something that I love to do. 

So yes, my ukulele is out of tune. I don’t quite play the right notes. I don’t practice enough, and that is okay. Because for me, sitting down and playing is a reminder that not everything has to be about working towards a goal. It reminds me of the importance of doing something just for the sake of doing it — not to become the best at it, not to achieve something, not to work up to an external standard, but just to do it. 

I am not saying that there is no space in our lives for evaluation. Striving to improve at something (it doesn’t really matter what it is) is, in my opinion, very important and honorable. When you love something, you want to do it well. You want to be excellent. This is an essential part of being human. 

I am just saying that evaluation cannot be the only mode in which we live our lives. It can quickly go too far. There needs to be space for both evaluation and enjoyment, for improvement and experience. Or else, we come to see ourselves as machines — centered around generating output and crossing things off our to-do-lists — and life becomes tragically transactional. Our mental narratives become about doing something in order to achieve something else in order to move onto the next thing and do it all over again. Engaging in creative outlets such as music reminds me that there is more to life than this. 

The other side of the story, to me, sounds a little something like, “A minor, G, C. Down two times, up two times, down and up again.”

Maybe one day I will try to get better at playing my ukulele. But right now, I don’t really want to. I am content with playing The Beatles’s “Let it Be” and Vance Joy’s “Riptide” over and over again (sorry, roommates). I just want to make some music every now and then in my dorm room. When will that be enough?