When I began my journey into Michel de Montaigne in 2011, I behaved like I often do, jumping in head-first without a clue what I was doing. I started writing about Montaigne without reading him. I had read about him and had some idea, at least second-hand, what his project entailed. But I did not know, essay to essay, what he was trying to convey.

And yet, I completed the project and parts of that initial work survived years of re-reading, rewriting and rethinking. Some of it was nonsense. Other parts were beyond my day-by-day approach to the project, so I evaded the hard analysis. An interesting element of the initial project, however, was my personal touch. Whether I got Montaigne or not, I shared freely about what the text was bringing out in me. That part could not be true or false.

I’ve zigged and zagged through the personal reflections aspect of this project through the years and in my most recent walks through the Montaigne corpus, I’ve shared minimally. That’s helped me get a stronger grip on the original text. But something, no question, was lost in that shift.

Montaigne’s first essay is interesting because it announces that polar opposite strategies can yield the same outcomes depending on the situation. There’s no solid, immutable wisdom to be passed down and shared, only our best guesses based on what we know about the circumstances at hand and our experience.

So, yes, Montaigne’s first essay connects directly to his last. It’s possible to read Montaigne’s essays exactly the same way one would experience James Joyce’s FINNEGAN’S WAKE, as a circular story with no beginning or end.

This summer, I decided that I had spent too much time away from playing music and I needed to refresh my skills on the guitar and bass. I signed up for classes at the Old Town School of Folk Music, turning back the clock to group guitar lessons I’d taken a decade ago.

The first terrifying lesson I learned is that once muscle memory is lost, the hands are at sea. I knew what it meant to fret a barre chord on an acoustic guitar, but forgot how to create a pleasant sound from it. I’d also forgotten how important it is to have a properly set up guitar, especially for hands without the proper callouses.

On the bass, my experience was even worse. I’d forgotten the scale shapes and how to outline chords. But even worse, my technique was a mess. I couldn’t keep a stable position on the fretboard and frantically shifted to every note. The first class was a panic-filled disaster. Only five years ago, I was playing complicated bass parts in front of an audience, but now I couldn’t even play an A major scale.

What made it all worse is that I now know what I cannot do. My knowledge of music and instruments has not disappeared. I still understand chord progressions and voice leading and all of the other minutiae of music theory I’d picked up as I first learned the instruments. And after just a few days of refresher work, I memorized the fret board. But I still couldn’t play.

That took more practice, experience, and routine — and a month later, I’m beginning to catch up to my former self. I feel somewhat akin to the Dougie character in “Twin Peaks: The Return.” There was a musician buried in me somewhere, but it had to be woken up, slowly and awkwardly.

The physical routines of the body are far more important than we appreciate in our day to day existence. When we get out of our habits, it takes significantly more work and energy to achieve things that at other times flow out naturally. And this can apply just as much to showing up at a physical location every day as it does to doing something complicated and precise.

We learn, place things into our every day flow, and then let go of the things we grow tired of or that become replaced with new routines. Returning again to the things we previously felt we mastered can be humbling. Life is about endlessly learning and relearning.

Making rediscovery a regular practice is an important way to find appreciation for earlier versions of ourselves too. It’s tempting to think life is progressive and we are always the best version of what we can be in that moment. But that’s never entirely true. Sometimes we let go of useful and joyful things, just because. And we need to find a way back to them.