The Thunder of the Drums

I'm the first to admit that it's easy to get me to want to do something new. It's much harder to get me (or for me to get myself) to follow through on these flights of fancy. One of my more recent larks is the desire to play the Japanese Taiko drums (click for a video). Why? Hell-if-i-know. It just seemed cool.

Can I afford even the most basic Taiko drum starting at $800? Nope. No problem - I found a guy with a video series on how to craft a practice drum out of an old tire and a roll of packing tape.

Can I afford the $100 DVD video lessons? Well, that's a little trickier. I might be able to find free lessons online, but I'm not sure. But no, I'm not paying a hundred bucks for a video tutorial.

Do I know anything about playing the drums? Nope! I'd be a raw novice at it.

Do I have time for this? Heck no!

So why do I do this stuff? Part of it, I think, is laziness. Which makes no sense at all - you don't do MORE stuff because you're lazy. UNLESS you're lazy and don't want to do the stuff you're currently doing, which is hard. What you really want is to find something you're naturally talented at - something you can just pick up and be GREAT at. Something you don't even need to try to do - it practically just happens all by itself. That would be awesome. But if you don't try new things, you may never discover that thing you're super-good at, so you keep trying new stuff.

Another part of the laziness is that the start-up of a new hobby is pretty easy - you go out and buy a bunch of stuff and you're good to go. It's the later stages that get tough - the practice, the failure, the frustration, the sore muscles or finding out that you're actually really terrible at whatever it is you've started to do. All of that comes later.

So, yeah, I'll probably get bored and wander off toward something else before ever even getting started on Taiko drumming. Part of being lazy is having a short attention span. But for one brief time, the drums of ancient Japan sang inside my head.