Essays

by Scribes Stories · 5 min read · 3 views

On Being Beginners Again There is a particular humiliation reserved for adults who decide, usually well into their thirties or forties, to learn something entirely new. Not a refinement of an existing skill, not a natural next step from something they already do well, but a true beginning, the kind that requires standing in a room full of strangers half their age and being genuinely, visibly bad at something. I felt this humiliation acutely the year I decided to learn to swim properly, at thirty six, having spent my whole life quietly avoiding deep water with the vague, unexamined belief that swimming was simply a thing other people knew how to do. My instructor was twenty three. The other adults in the beginner class kept glancing at me with the particular sympathy reserved for someone clearly older than the assumed skill level should allow. What struck me most, though, was not the embarrassment itself, which faded faster than I expected, but how unfamiliar the entire experience of being a beginner had become. Somewhere in the years between childhood and middle age, I had quietly arranged my whole life around competence. I did the things I was already good at. I avoided, without quite noticing I was avoiding them, entire categories of experience simply because starting from zero had become intolerable to a version of myself that had grown used to already knowing things. This is, I think, one of the quieter tragedies of growing older. Not that we lose the ability to learn, which research on adult neuroplasticity suggests is far more available to us than the old stereotypes claimed, but that we lose the tolerance for the specific discomfort of not yet knowing. Children are beginners constantly, at everything, all the time, and nobody expects otherwise of them. They fall off bicycles in public without a flicker of self consciousness, because falling off the bicycle is simply what happens on the way to riding it. Adults, somewhere along the way, decide that falling off things in public is a referendum on their worth as a person, rather than a normal and unremarkable feature of learning anything difficult. We build entire identities around the illusion of already knowing, and then we structure our lives to protect that illusion, quietly steering away from anything that might expose the beginner still living underneath decades of accumulated competence. I noticed, in that swimming class, that the other adults who struggled most were not the ones with the least natural aptitude for the water, but the ones most visibly upset by their own incompetence, tensing against the very discomfort that learning requires, as though the water itself had personally insulted them by refusing to be immediately masterable. The ones who improved fastest were, without exception, the ones who had somehow retained or rediscovered a child's relationship to failure. They swallowed water, laughed about it, tried again. They accepted, without much internal drama, that this was simply what week one of a new skill looked like, and that week one looking clumsy was not actually a referendum on their intelligence or worth, only an accurate description of where they currently stood on a learning curve everyone eventually climbs at their own pace. I think about this now whenever I consider avoiding something new, which, if I am honest, is more often than I would like to admit. The pottery class I keep meaning to try. The language I have wanted to learn for a decade but keep postponing until some imagined future point when I will supposedly have more patience for sounding foolish. The instrument gathering dust in the corner of my living room, purchased in an optimistic year, abandoned somewhere around the second lesson when my fingers refused to cooperate the way I had unreasonably expected them to on day one. There is a cost to protecting our competence so carefully. It is a quiet cost, easy to miss, because avoiding the discomfort of beginning rarely feels like loss in the moment. It feels, instead, like sensible self preservation, like knowing your limits, like being a reasonable adult who has better things to do than embarrass themselves at swimming lessons alongside twenty three year old instructors. But multiply that avoidance across a whole adult lifetime, and you arrive somewhere sadder than you intended. A life quietly narrowed down to only the things you were already good at, the beginner's mind slowly starved out of you by decades of careful self protection. I did eventually learn to swim, adequately if not gracefully, and the achievement itself mattered less to me, in the end, than what the process reminded me I was still capable of. Not swimming specifically, but beginning. Being bad at something in front of witnesses and surviving it. Discovering that the twenty three year olds in the room, far from judging me the way my anxious imagination had predicted, mostly just wanted everyone in the pool to have a decent time, myself included. I think we owe it to ourselves, at every age, to keep some small corner of our lives reserved for genuine beginnings, not because we need more skills, necessarily, but because we need the practice of not yet knowing. It keeps something essential alive in us, some flexibility of identity that calcifies quickly if left entirely unused. The beginner's mind is not a phase we graduate out of once we become sufficiently competent adults. It is a muscle, like any other, that atrophies the moment we stop deliberately exercising it. So find the thing you have been avoiding precisely because you would be bad at it. Not despite the badness. Because of it. Stand in the room full of strangers who already know how. Fall off the metaphorical bicycle, publicly, without the elaborate internal drama your adult mind wants to attach to the falling. There is something in that specific discomfort, faced honestly and repeatedly, that keeps a person young in the ways that actually matter, far more reliably than any of the more conventional methods we usually reach for instead. We were all beginners once, at everything, without shame. It turns out we are allowed to be again, any time we're brave enough to let ourselves.