End of July. The last session before the break. I close the door quietly, the way you do when something good has been left behind in the room, and I put the guitar back in its case with the gesture of a lifetime: first I slacken the strings. One turn of the key, half a step down, "so the neck doesn't warp" — my teacher told me that forty years ago and I've done it ever since without thinking, a small ritual of affection towards the wood.
And while I'm zipping up the case, a crooked little thought arrives: her strings, the guitar's, I loosen every single time. Mine, in ten months, nobody has loosened at all.
The job that tunes the world
When someone asks me what I do for a living, I have an answer I'm fond of: I tune the world. Put like that it sounds a bit full of itself, I know. But that's what we do, isn't it? We put people in relation, we bring a little consonance where there was only clashing, we keep time for those who've lost the beat, we offer a reference note to anyone wandering without a key. We loosen tensions. We make music together and — on a good day — something comes into tune.
We tell that story with pride, and rightly so. It's a fine trade, sorting out other people's dissonances and letting them resolve.
Shame we keep forgetting one small detail.
The instrument is you (and it goes out of tune behind your back)
The instrument you tune other people with isn't the guitar. It's you.
And instruments, as everyone knows, go out of tune. Not all at once — that would be far too convenient, you'd notice straight away. They go out of tune slowly, in secret, a cent at a time. One string gives way under the strain of a difficult session, another slackens in the damp of ten months that all look alike. And the worst part is that you carry on playing without noticing, because the ear adapts: your being out of tune becomes your new "in tune".
The trouble is that we have no reference A. No tuning fork. That steady sound, from outside, that you go back to in order to work out how far you've drifted. You play all day long to bring other people into tune, and meanwhile you quietly lose your own tonal centre — with nobody around to give you the A to start again from.
We know everything about the guitar and nothing about ourselves
And here's the paradox that almost makes me laugh. About looking after the wooden instrument we know it all: slacken the strings when it rests, don't leave it in the sun, change the strings now and then, keep the humidity right inside the case. We'll talk about it for hours, we write books about it.
And about looking after ourselves? Silence. In all my years of training — the placement hours, the manuals, the supervision sessions — I can't remember a single time when somebody taught me how to get myself back in tune. How to recognise when one of my strings has given way. How to take care of myself not as an indulgence, but as part of the job.
About one thing I have no doubts: an instrument that's out of tune doesn't make sound dialogue. It makes noise. You can have all the shared goals in the world, the cleanest methodology, the most close-knit team — but if the instrument you carry into the room is out of tune, the A you offer the other person will always be a hair's breadth false. Self-care isn't the luxury you allow yourself when there's time left over. It's maintenance. It's method. It sits inside the work, not beside it.
Then of course: not everything can be tuned on your own. There's a kind of tiredness that doesn't come from inside us but from around us — from the thin recognition, the fragile contracts, the uncertain place we occupy inside organisations. That one doesn't get solved by slackening the strings, and I don't want to pretend otherwise. But it's a different conversation, and it deserves a piece of its own.
A reader reminded me of all this, with one simple line: "we mustn't forget about ourselves." She was right, and the manuals weren't.
Summer as the gesture of slackening the strings
That's why that end-of-July gesture isn't a surrender. Slackening the strings isn't giving up on the music: it's the care that lets the instrument last, keeps it from warping, brings it back in September ready to vibrate without having snapped in August.
So do it too. Slacken your own strings. It isn't idleness, it's maintenance — the same maintenance you give your guitar without even thinking. Give yourselves permission to drop half a step, to spend a few weeks a little looser, a little less taut.
Then, in September, we'll pick the instrument up again. We'll turn the key slowly, a cent at a time, looking for our A. And we'll come back to the tonal centre — that fixed point from which, in order to tune the world, you first of all have to be in tune yourself.
Have a good summer. Take your time getting back in tune.