On being a beginner

I always want to be the expert. It doesn’t matter what the subject is, I want to feel like I know it all—or at least enough to look like I’m an expert. Unfortunately, that’s not reality. I think this feeling comes from wanting to look good in others’ eyes. It’s all about how I appear. I said in an Instagram post once, “I want to feel like I’m a good person and I want others to think I am too.” My motives are not completely selfless. Maybe you can relate.

I’m slowly reading through a book called The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. It is a self-described “course in discovering and recovering your creative self.” In other words, how to get unstuck when you feel stuck, creatively. It is highly recommended among my writer friends, so here I am, giving it a go. It’s a book where you read a chapter a week, and then do the prescribed exercises.

One of my favorite things she says so far (I’ve only finished chapter 2) is this:

“Give yourself permission to be a beginner . . . It is impossible to get better and look good at the same time.”

Doesn’t that just give you hope? It does me! To think that at age 61 I can start anything I want and it’s okay to not be good at it is very freeing. It’s okay to make mistakes or look like I don’t know what I’m doing . . . because I don’t!

Maybe fourteen or so years ago when my daughter Abbey was just starting college, we bought her first DSLR camera, a Nikon d5000. She had to have this camera because she was going to study art, and photography would be part of it. With three children in college and one in braces, it was all we could afford. When I saw the beautiful photos she produced with this bottom-of-the-barrel camera, I was so jealous I bought one for myself and figured I could learn how to use it.

But here’s the difference between 18 and 50 year olds: electronic gadgets are second-nature to teenagers. Not so much for middle-aged moms. I wish I had a dollar for every time Abbey explained aperture and ISO and shutter speed and the whole exposure triangle thing. She tried the simile of a hose letting more or less water through. It was all an effort in futility.

We went on photography walks together: the two of us with identical cameras and lenses, her telling me what settings to use, taking a picture of the same thing. Hers were beautiful; mine were . . . not. How could this be?

I was a beginner. She had an artist’s eye from birth and she did not inherit it from her mama. She’d been practicing being an artist as long as she’d been alive. I had not. She’d been seeing beauty in everyday things that I never looked at because I was so busy momming. Her drawings as a 2-year-old were not just crayon scribbles; they were her practice to get better. They were not time-wasters for her; they were her way of improving her craft even as a toddler. She was willing to be bad as a child to develop the ability to draw this:

My oldest daughter, Deb, is famous for her pies. When she was just a child I taught her how to make a homemade pie crust, how to make the filling, how to partially cover it with foil for part of the baking time so it wouldn’t get too brown. I taught the girl how to bake a pie, just like my mother taught me.

Are my pies as good as hers? Not by a long shot. They’re pretty good, but no one has ever paid $175 for one of my apple pies. They have for hers. She practiced paid attention to which spices and what kind of fat were better and she perfected her craft over many years. Then finally she used it to snag a husband and I am not even kidding. She figured out it was the way to her particular man’s heart, so she practiced the skill, burned a few along the way, and became a pie artist. But she was willing to go through not-so-great part to get to the expert part.

My middle daughter, Leah, is a musician. My kids are all musically talented, but Leah has played violin professionally, one season with the Nashville Philharmonic Orchestra. She teaches violin and orchestra to students of all ages, and she is phenomenal at it. She has a gift for working with middle schoolers, the ones other teachers can’t relate to and don’t want to try.

One time when Leah was 9 or 10 years old, she was practicing her violin when my brother called on the phone. I answered it (the kind that was attached to the wall by a twirly cord) and he asked, “What is that noise? It sounds like somebody’s strangling a cat!” She was a beginner. It wasn’t possible for her to get better and sound good at the same time. She had to practice the screeching so she could learn how not to screech. Today she is long past the cat-strangling stage. She became an artist, but she didn’t always sound good on the way there. She had to be willing to be mediocre in order to get good.

This all got me thinking about what I would like to get good at. I feel like, at 61, I’d better hurry up and figure it out. I’ve done yoga before and, while I was never an expert at it, I was better than I am now. Right now I am a beginner but I’m showing up on the mat every morning and looking bad at it. At least the class is a solitary one in my basement office where no one sees me. I’m getting out of breath (yes, doing yoga) and my legs are shaking and I’m silently begging for this pose to be over. But I’m starting because I know it’s good for me and I feel good when the class is done. I’m willing to be bad for a while because I know I’ll get better.

I still have the desire to take beautiful pictures. Right now my attempts are with my phone. I still have the old Nikon d5000 camera, but my phone camera actually has more megapixels than that DSLR—and it’s easier to use. Some day I will buy a better DSLR and, once again, try to understand the exposure triangle. I’ll be bad in the beginning—maybe I’ll be bad forever—but my desire to create will keep me going.

I used to grow an amazing, prolific garden. Seriously, eight-foot-tall tomato plants and kale so bushy you couldn’t tell where the rows were. Since we left Northern Virginia in 2015 my gardens have been well below average. It’s been a frustrating. Last year I grew exactly one ear of corn, and Sweetheart ate it when the cows got out in August. I struggled with tomatoes, beans, peas, peppers, herbs—everything that used to be easy. For whatever reasons, I am a beginner, learning all over again. I have to be willing to look bad to get back to being good.

I recently listened to a podcast interview with Shauna Niequist, author of I Guess I Haven’t Learned That Yet. She introduces her book by telling the story of moving their family of four from the suburbs of Chicago, where they’d always lived, to Manhattan. After six weeks in a new—and I probably don’t have to say, large—city, Shauna wrote the phrase that became her book’s title on a piece of paper and taped it to the wall in the living room. She told the family: “Here’s the deal. All four of us are going to say this about something every single day.

So here we are at the beginning of a new year. It’s a clean slate, the perfect time to start that thing you’ve always wanted to do. What is it? What is the thing that has always been in the back of your creative mind, but your logic brain keeps telling you can’t ever happen? What little step can you take toward making it a reality?

This is your permission to be a beginner and not look good while you’re working on it. The good news is if you’re terrible at it now, you can only go up, right? You can only get better. So tell your logic brain to sit down and shut up and let your creative brain have some fun.

Be a beginner.