By I saved for months to buy a guitar. It still hasn’t been played. The real question isn’t why — it’s what that silence is telling me.
For years, the guitar was the answer to everything. Long days at the office, overtime that bled into evenings, weekends that looked like weekdays — through all of it I had one thought running quietly in the background: if I had a guitar, things would be different. I would come home and play. I would learn songs I loved. I would spend evenings doing something that was mine, fully and completely mine.
The guitar stood for everything I was not doing. It was the life I was going to live once the hustle was over.
So I worked. I saved. Every extra hour, every skipped lunch, every paycheck stretched tight — slowly, rupee by rupee, it added up. And one day I walked into a shop and bought it. A Nepali brand. More than twelve thousand rupees. Every penny I had. I carried it home like I was carrying something precious, because I was.
The guitar stood in the corner and looked at me. I looked back. And then I went to bed, because tomorrow was a workday.
That was a while ago. The guitar still sits on its stand. It has not moved. I pass it every morning on the way to my desk. It watches me open my laptop. It watches me take calls. It watches me do everything I was doing before I bought it — everything except play.
Here is the question I kept refusing to ask myself: was I ever chasing the guitar? Or was I chasing the version of myself who had time to play one?
The guitar was never really about music. It was about a life with space in it. A life where evenings belonged to me. Where I could sit with something I loved and go slowly and make mistakes and not be in a hurry. The guitar was a symbol. And symbols, when you finally hold them in your hands, do not automatically give you the life they represented.
A moment to reflect
Think about the thing you have been saving for, waiting for, working toward. The trip. The instrument. The course. The book you keep meaning to write. Now ask yourself: when you imagine having it, what does the rest of the day look like? Because that rest of the day — that is what you actually want. The thing is just the door.
Have you built a life where you can walk through that door? Or are you still collecting doors?
We tell ourselves that once we have the thing, the life will follow. But the life does not come with the purchase. The life has to be built first — or at least alongside. The guitar needed time, not money. I gave it money. I never gave it time.
There is something quietly devastating about getting exactly what you wanted and discovering you are still not living the way you imagined. It is not the guitar’s fault. It is not even your fault. It is just the gap between wanting a thing and wanting the conditions that make that thing possible. And most of us — honest about it or not — are better at earning the thing than building the conditions.
The guitar sits there. Patient. Strings still in tune, more or less. It is not accusing me. It is just waiting. And I think — if I listen to that silence carefully enough — it is asking the only question that matters:
What exactly are you waiting for?
Not for money. Not for the weekend. Not for things to slow down on their own, because they will not. You already have the guitar. The question now is whether you will build the life that deserves one.
Day 1: Nobody Told You Writing Was Supposed to Be Easy | Susan Chaudhary
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