My dear friend Ashay gave me a comic from Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal many months ago.
In lieu of Gladwell’s ten thousand hours, I present 11 opportunities.
7 years to mastery, of which you can repeat 11 times in different fields of interest from maturity of youth until your passing.
This begs the question. What 11 oceans do I choose?
Instead of treating this problem as “picking out of a hat,” you can choose to treat each moment as preparing you for the next. Learning how to learn. As you progress in your own natural inclinations, some talents and weaknesses emerge. My second opportunity will most likely share some overlap with the first. But this is not to say that ease should be your compass. Seven years is a long time to stew and be upset and sit with discomfort. Given enough time, any newness will no longer hold any significance. What emerges instead is a comfort. A confidence of having a better sense of ability than before. It’s somewhere between the raw agate beneath but also the grit in the environment that helped to slough off and reveal by abrasion.
Youth is when we begin to peek our dirty blind heads out of the soil. In fact, I would argue that adolescence is about developing a fondness for a thing that is not another person, without regard for social norms or difficult truths: before a lover comes a love. For me, the obsessive fuel was dance, in my junior years. At that time, not even my most dear and intense relationships with real people could do my love justice. Of course with age the switch flipped. Unfortunately for most, loving another person cannot serve as a profession or even hobby. That’s why I bring up this idea of skill mastery, not the interpersonal kind.
(Jamie, this one’s for you. I am The more loving one.)
Any discipline in great seriousness is quite the enslaving endeavor which bears the greatest fruit. Joy in pain, and relief in the occasional payoff by external validation.
If you are a pessimist, here’s the other side of the coin.
“most things are not worth learning”
I’ve been playing pickleball with mostly retirees, and I am constantly surprised by how much more alive they seem than my younger peers. I get a feeling that in old age comes a condensation of sorts. Your essence becomes stronger because you have less time in the day to do exactly what you want to do, so you focus with wary eyes. Your tired appearance becomes a guise for the colorful internal world you have sharpened and become used to in years of marination.
Less time, more charisma. It’s better than ignorance. It’s a tragic bonsai tree of decaying synapses in a struggle to say I left this world fighting for something I thought was beautiful.