Guitar Strings

Whenever we experience the thrill of driving or the excitement of seeing a new film, it’s always accompanied by something that’s significantly less attractive. No matter how much I enjoy driving, I have to wash my car at the end of the day. At the cinema, I could be seeing the film of the decade but there’ll always be people making noise.

Of course, some people enjoy washing their car. Rather than simply sending it through the local car wash or a fiver, they love to soap the bonnet, windows and rims. After a hard hour’s work, they step back to admire their handiwork – cue the generic sigh.

Unfortunately, I’m the complete opposite. I don’t always see the logic in knuckling down, washing the car and putting in the effort. The car wash is there for a reason, regardless of the weather! But is this really how we should live? In Kazuo Ishiguro’s book, Remains of the Day, it is said: "The evening's the best part of the day. You've done your day's work. Now you can put your feet up and enjoy it." Therefore, it’s inherently wrong to put pleasure before pain, but why?

When I started playing guitar six years ago, I had no idea how to change the strings. Whenever one broke, which it eventually did considering how hard I battered the guitars, I took it to the local guitar shop and had it repaired. It cost me ten pounds in total, an extra fiver on top of the strings. Of course, I was young and this was a price to pay for my novice experience.

However, money soon stacked up. Because I was neglecting effort on my part – I wasn’t bothering to learn how to resting my guitar – it cost double the amount of money. Needless to say, three years later when I realised how much money I was wasting, I quickly learnt how to do it!

So what am I getting at? As I said, it’s wrong to put pleasure in front of pain. In this case, I was being lazy and paying the guitar store instead of putting in the effort myself. How many times in our lives do we neglect hard work for simple pleasure? Whether it’s not doing the coursework now and leaving it till later, or not giving up smoking and saying we have the rest of our lives to deal with that. This isn’t true.

We cannot afford to rest on our laurels and worry about it later. We need to take responsibility and put in the hours. Only then can we relax.

I know that when I next look outside the window and see a dirty car, I’m going to be one of those guys who enjoy washing it. Afterwards, I can drive with pride, in the knowledge that not only did I save money, I accomplished something for myself through hard work and effort.