I was watching a fellow guitarist playing a version of Girl from Ipanema this week — a tune we’ve all been working on together this month. He’s a capable player, but he always reaches for the complicated solution. Things that are beyond him, played with obvious effort, the joins showing. I found myself wondering why. Why make it harder than it needs to be?

It struck me that we are complete opposites.

My instinct, increasingly, is to simplify. To find the least amount that still does the job. Two notes instead of five. A silence held a beat longer than it should be. A chord left to ring until it starts to tell a different story.

That instinct didn’t arrive fully formed. There was a specific moment.

A couple of seasons ago I broke my right arm. Badly enough to spend a good stretch in a cast. And because I am who I am, I still picked up the guitar — carefully, awkwardly, with considerably less available to me than usual. You can’t attack anything with a broken arm in a cast. You can barely hang on.

So I didn’t attack. I played what I could reach. Slowly, with gaps. And somewhere in that enforced restraint I found something I hadn’t expected to find: I liked it. Not just in a “making the best of it” way. Genuinely liked it. I liked the idea of letting something be there slightly longer than it should. A note. A silence. A chord sitting in time and space until it either resolved naturally or started to drift outside of its original intention — starting to clash, starting to become something else. That tension between the thing you placed and the moment it begins to turn. There’s music in that gap.

The broken arm didn’t teach me technique. It taught me patience. It taught me that the guitar doesn’t need you to fill every available moment with something. Sometimes the most interesting thing you can do is put something down and then leave it there, and see what happens. I think about the player I was watching. The complexity is its own kind of effort — a constant forward motion, always reaching for the next thing. There’s nowhere to stop. But stopping is where a lot of the feeling lives.

The cast came off. The arm healed. But I kept the lesson.

Less isn’t a compromise. It’s a choice. And sometimes it’s the harder one — because there’s nowhere to hide in a two-note voicing, a long silence, or a chord that you’re willing to let become something unexpected.

All you can do is put it there. And trust it.