"The Empty Path"

The Author's "Wall of Shame"

I have fourteen stringed instruments hanging in my music studio, on what I call my Wall of Shame. For years and years, I had only one instrument, a 1972 Martin D18 acoustic guitar that I bought new for $450 from a music store on Yonge Street in Toronto. That was a lot of money for me at the time and I loved that guitar more than anything else I'd ever owned. Whenever I've been asked, as happens in workshops on "values clarification," what I would take with me from my burning house, it was always the Martin.

I wrote and performed dozens of songs on that guitar, maybe hundreds. It was rich and mellow, and it only got better with age ... until, after forty-five years, I had to get it repaired. The neck was bowing, raising the strings above the fretboard, making it harder to play. It didn't have a truss rod, as modern guitars do, where a quarter turn with an Allen key and the thing would have fixed itself. So, it required a full neck job, an exacting procedure that involved removing the neck completely and reinstalling it. The shop would have it for six weeks, the technician only doing a little work on it at a time, the job being that intense.

Feeling disloyal, unfaithful even, I decided to rent another guitar in the interim. That got me playing a lot of guitars I'd never played before. I was like a kid, trying all these instruments and feeling how each one brought something new to my playing. I settled on a Gibson Hummingbird. The thing was fast for picking and loud for strumming and when I got the Martin back I found myself in a bit of a quandry. But also, as enamoured as I was by the Hummingbird, the Martin wasn't the same after its time in the shop. It didn't feel as responsive to my touch, it didn't boom as it once did. So, fatefully, I took my first turn down Guitar Road. I gave my beloved Martin to my son, a budding songwriter in his own right, and I bought for myself that Gibson.

From there, there was no stopping me: four electric guitars, two amps, two pedal boards, a banjo, a mandolin, a ukulele, a travel guitar, a tenor guitar, a baritone, a twelve-string, a nylon-string, each new instrument introducing me to a new range of creative possibilities. And the songs kept coming. I once quipped onstage that if ever a songwriter was in a slump, all they needed to do was lay down some hard cash on a new instrument. I had just purchased a new guitar myself and at the rate the new songs were coming I figured they were only costing me about five hundred dollars a pop. As if money could buy magic.

Billy Wynne, with whom I spoke for this week's episode of The Mystic Cave, would understand this completely. For one thing, he is a musician, so he would have his own version of Guitar Road. But he is also a health and well-being entrepreneur and a meditation teacher and mindfulness coach, so he knows the fleeting satisfaction of 'more' and the insatiable thirst that is never quenched when we are in the clutches of our need for 'more'. His recent book, The Empty Path, invites us all, even the guitar buyers, to pause and to breathe and to consider what he calls "the radical art of lessening."

It's not what you think. There's the art of decluttering, which is related, but not the same. There's the art of letting go, which, Wynne says, can actually be the opposite of lessening. And it's not just about down-sizing, though that may follow. It's the realization that whatever we desire, as 'more', is an illusion in the first place. That's why it never satisfies. All of life as we know it is made of assumptions, like: there's not enough to go around; something is missing; we ourselves are inadequate. We think 'more' is the answer. It's not. 'Less' is the answer, leading us ultimately to emptiness itself, where we can finally recognize the extravagant abundance of each passing moment, the momentary glory of each impermanent thing, and the fullness found in ... nothing at all.

Instinctively, I have known this all along. In fact, just a few months ago, I put one of my guitars and one of my amps up for sale, the first step toward dismantling my Wall of Shame. It's time. While I have had a lot of fun exploring each new instrument, in truth, none has replicated or improved upon the magic of a well-crafted song played on my beloved old Martin. 'More' has indeed been an illusion. It's now time to make do with less, turn around, and find my way back home.

To listen to my conversation with Billy Wynne for The Mystic Cave, just click the Play button below. To find out more about his book and his work, follow the More Info button to the show notes.