DANNY ELLIS

If we look at life as a struggle to progress to some future goal of attainment or well-being, we move our selves out the bosom of the NOW, away from our natural state of ease and into an endless, impossible -to-attain vision of perfection. It's impossible to reach because we've put it in the future. Joy can't wait—it has to be NOW. We can have enormous fun simply playing a few chords or singing a song we know well. Progress will happen naturally and enjoyable without frustration.

As a trombonist in a cover band in the sixties, I envied our guitarist's rhythmic skill, so I asked him to teach me a few chords. He showed me one simple chord; an E chord. He refused to teach me any more until I mastered that E. Completely taken by the joy of rhythm and sound, I hammered away at it for weeks—on his guitar—after our gigs for a few moments till he'd grab it off me and pack it away. 

It took me months before I could play the next chord—an A chord, without stopping the rhythm, so I stayed on the E chord, bashing away gleefully, enjoying what I COULD do while knowing the A chord would eventually come. It would be a couple of years before I bought my own guitar—a Yamaha acoustic. My point is—take it slow and easy and enjoy every step.

Read what Teilhard De Chardin has to say about accepting and enjoying where you are in your journey. 

Above all, trust in the slow work of the Spirit.
We are quite naturally impatient in everything
to reach the end without delay. 
We should like to skip the intermediate stages.
We are impatient of being on the way to something
unknown, something new.

And yet it is the law of all progress
that it is made by passing through
some stages of instability-
and that it may take a very long time. And so I think it is with you.
Let your ideas mature gradually-let them grow
let them shape themselves, without undue haste.

Don’t try to force them on,
as though you could be today what time
(that is to say, grace and circumstances
acting on your own good will)
will make of you tomorrow
Only God could say what this new spirit
gradually forming within you will be.

Give her the benefit of believing
that her hand is leading you,
and accept the anxiety of feeling yourself
in suspense and incomplete.  

~Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: