THURSDAY'S CHILD

BABY STEPS

You’ve no doubt noticed that starting something new is no easy-peasy task.

For example—you retire. Ahead of you are seemingly endless days without your former 8 or 10 or 12 hours per day earmarked for a particular task or series of tasks. So you decide to tackle something new, say, woodworking.

Great! Get some books on woodworking. Go to the library and check out their back issues of magazines devoted to the subject. Find a mentor! (That’s the best of all—good old hands-on, show-me-how teaching.) (And an experienced mentor probably has all the expensive tools you may not want to buy right away. Check out a table saw, and you’ll see what I mean.)

After a few days/weeks/months of perusing the projects available, you decide on one. But—your mentor says, “better start with something smaller” (simpler) (less expensive). And you’re already discouraged. You really want to see that small (you thought) jewelry chest come to life. It’d make a great gift for your wife/daughter/auntie. Hmmm.

Now, why should you be discouraged? Everything has to start somewhere—the biggest, most complicated, and expensive projects—all had a humble beginning.

Discouraged? Well, of course you are! If you’ve lived long enough to be approaching retirement (see paragraph 2 above) you’ve not only learned a lot along the way, you’ve been injected with the idea that NOW is the best time to do anything, and NOW is when it’ll happen.

No Practice. No Trial & Error. No Baby Steps leading to a final goal. Uh-huh.

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I’ve now been retired for 15 years. Seems like every day I’m learning something new—not because I forgot how to do something, nor because I’m always trying different things. No, every day’s learning comes with practicing what I’ve been doing for years and years. The take-away for me is this: The longer I practice, the more likely I am to reach beyond where I’ve always been; and at that point, I embark on a new journey of learning. Same subject. Now deeper.

Somewhere I read that writing a novel doesn’t teach you how to write the next one. You learn that when you write it. So writing a novel teaches me how to write this one—and next time . . . . More practice. More trial and error. More learning.

A similar thing happens with painting, which is my current creative activity. I watch YouTube videos, I practice, I learn something, I paint using that technique. Sometimes I remember that technique and use it again and again. Then the next week’s video goes into detail about something else, and I’m on the learning curve again.

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Learning also happens when we make mistakes. (Some people say that’s exactly when learning occurs.)

Another example from my life: I’ve been knitting since my teens. Learning as I go. Trying new things. Now that knitting is only an occasional activity, I don’t tackle ambitious projects. But I still love the process of producing knitted and purled stitches in patterns. Then comes the day when I’ve been talking with my knitting buddy and not counting stitches or paying attention, and my project has gone into some kind of fit. It no longer looks like a square dishcloth, but now resembles part of an elephant, or maybe a hippopotamus. Backtracking from my mistake causes me to practice how to un-knit, how far back to actually go, and whether I can figure out where I can pick up the pattern again.

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Learning can be discouraging. I’ll agree with that about 97%. But why is that?

I suspect it has several causes:
·     Pride – if we’ve learned a lot of stuff already in our lives, why should this new thing take very long?
·     Time – along with our pride, there’s the time element—it keeps speeding up (seems like) and if I don’t learn this new thing pretty soon, I’ll be too old/infirm or lose interest completely.
·      Peer pressure – really? About learning something new? You betcha. Look at any magazine article or online set of classes. How many of them say something like “10 ways to look better in a week” or “7 days to a new you” or “make this table and chairs in a weekend”? Who says it can be done in X number of hours/days/weeks? Better question: Who cares?

My approach may not be yours. But here it is, if you care to hear it:

It takes as long as it takes.
It may take longer if you have more to learn. (Remember, those baby steps, practice, trial and error, etc.)
It may take longer because you get interrupted by Life. (Remember this one? Life is what happens when you’re making plans.)
It may take longer because you have to let go of somebody else’s expectation—and here’s a good place to remember: you don’t have to tell other people what you plan to do. They’ll give you advice, keep asking when it’s done, and wondering why it’s taking so long.

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Baby Steps. Think about a baby learning to walk. First there’s crawling, then standing upright. Next, walking along the couch, holding on. Then a tentative step away from the edge of the couch. A step or two. Then a fall. Unless the baby is hurt, it grunts and gets up again and tries to take off on two feet, no hands. Sometimes it even giggles when it falls. Now that's worth hearing.

Most of us started out like that—so why not use the Baby Steps method the rest of our lives? It worked before.

I leave you with two more words: