Something New

 

What’s the point of starting something new when you know you will never be good at it?

Margaret Talbot, “Starting Fresh” New Yorker, January 18, 2021

 

At 80, when my grandfather Nunzio gave up his beauty parlor, he took up drawing and painting.  He had been styling women’s hair since he was 20 most of that time in the little shop he rented in the Commodore Hotel near Harvard University.  There he styled the hair of Harvard professor’s wives flirting with them in French or Italian as he wrapped strands of hair around curlers, added red highlights, teased and sprayed thin layers into high standing crowns.  After giving up the business, he continued styling hair at the senior center and nursing homes until the accident with the snow blower that took three fingers off of his left hand.  When he could no longer style hair, he took up drawing and painting with the same tenderness and fervor he had brought to the ladies for all those years.

 The family was so happy he had found something to do with his time after that terrible accident.  For every holiday, birthday, or anniversary, we loaded him down with chalks, oils, brushes and canvases.  He spent hours everyday sketching and painting from his memory Sicilian landscapes, blue draped Madonna with child (infants, toddlers, grown man sized), profiles of the ladies he made beautiful, and birds.  Out of all of his drawings few remain. After he died, I claimed one of a yellow brown feathered bird bursting out of a too small nest.  It hangs on a wall in my kitchen where I see it every day. When I look at it, I am reminded of his kindness and smile and the ease, faith, and vigor he carried with him his whole long life. He presence comes through the drawing and into my heart. I see where old hands made each chalk stroke, wonder about the thin lines of blue and red threaded in the tangled kindling of the nest, how the leaves along the branches of the tree look like they are in flame. 

It isn't so easy to take up something new as adults. We live in a culture where we are not encouraged to learn new things for the pleasure of learning them especially when it is not likely we will ever be that good at them.  We lack the time and support of family and friends.  We face inner obstacles like pride and shame, sloth, and fear of failing. For anyone past 30, there is that constant wondering if we are just too old for this. It is often easier to watch TV, shop, or gossip during our free time than take up a new instrument that hurts our fingers, a language we can't wrap our tongues around, yoga with stiffness and pain.

And yet, as Margaret Talbot explores in a January 2020 New Yorker article, a spate of new books on the subject tells us we are missing something when we stop learning new things.  Taking up a language or instrument or better both stimulates our brains, bodies, and spirits in many positive ways.  These are the skills we cultivate not to earn a living but for the sheer joy of learning something deeply, with focus, and over a long period of time.  It is what our human brains, bodies, and spirit were meant to do.   

I would like to join a Gospel chorus post COVID.  When I was in high school, I played trumpet (not very well) in the school band.  It was thrilling to march together around that muddy football field in those funny uniforms belting out songs fast and loud.  Inside during the concert band season, the music was more nuanced and complicated.  We had to listen closely to each other – trumpets, flutes, clarinets, and trombones -  to weave together the fabric of the music.  In this pandemic, I miss coming into tune and rhythm with others in conversation, in the chanting of Ohm at the beginning of yoga class, singing together at a concert.  The prospect of joining a choir gives me hope, something new for my heart, my brain, my spirit.