When I began this free inquiry project, I thought that what I wanted was to learn music. I thought that I wanted to regain lost skills and acquire a new hobby by the end of it. My instruments had been just sitting neglected and acquiring dust for years, and this seemed like a logical way to put them to use.

This was partially true. My project seemed to fit neatly into the Four Pillars of Inquiry – I was reigniting a withered passion for music by taking on the challenge of trying to reteach myself by being curious about the process that would work, with the goal of being able to “sort of play” them at the end.

But even right at the beginning, I knew that I wanted something more than simply learning a skill. I said in my first blog post that my goal was to be able to play for enjoyment. I think that I had somewhat of an inkling that I was missing some sort of creative outlet in my life. Throughout this inquiry process, I discovered that this wasn’t just something I wanted, but something that I ended up becoming quite desperate for, and that creativity alone wasn’t the only thing I needed an outlet for.

I was fairly structured at the beginning of this inquiry, as one might expect the inquiry process to be. I set a loose but flexible plan, I had specific goals that I aimed for each week, and I adapted them as needed. I gained skills, and I was making progress as I had hoped. I always aimed to have fun, but I did what I was “supposed” to do, as I would for any school project.

Things began to shift for me in the middle of term, however. To put it narratively, monsters I thought that I had vanquished long ago resurrected and returned to haunt me when I let my guard down. To put it clinically, symptoms from previous mental health struggles unexpectedly returned. I found myself again with a brain that wasn’t functioning properly, and I knew that I needed to make changes to fix this.

One thing I discovered that I needed to do was to change my mindset around my inquiry project. I found that keeping myself beholden to progress goals caused me to shut down and avoid even looking at my instruments. When I abandoned those, however, I found myself turning to my music as a way to get out of my own head and release some of the poison that seemed to be in my mind.

And at this point, my inquiry changed. My passion was feeling free. My goal was to function again. I was curious about strategies that would help me do this. And my new challenge was to implement these strategies.

So that is what I let myself do. Rather than practising, I just let myself play. Rather than doing what would be best for my skill, I did what was best for my own well-being.

An example of this is my video below. You would expect my final video at the end of an inquiry project to be a polished performance of a piece I have been working hard to perfect, but that’s not what this is. This is me deciding that I want to create the hero’s theme from a nostalgic movie, a song of “a new hope,” if you will (hehehe). I just printed out the sheet music, noodled with it for a few minutes, and then recorded. It’s not good, I make many mistakes, but it’s a real example of how I have been doing what I needed to do.

I had expected this free inquiry to serve as a method to document my progression in learning a skill. To my surprise, it became a medium for very personal expression. Inquiry often leads down unexpected paths, but this is not one I would have predicted to end up on.