Picking up where we left off
Not everything is like riding a bicycle. (Florida Memory)
An important aspect of planning for a trip is deciding which board games to take.
Isn’t it?
Well, it is for us. And because our next trip requires a flight and we won’t have a lot of space, we’re going to be taking a board game that is really more of a card game — just a few tokens and decks.
The thing is, we haven’t played this game in over a year. I’m pretty sure we will have to re-learn how to play, complete with directions.
The good news is that re-learning a game doesn’t take as long as learning it in the first place. But it does need to happen. It can’t be skipped over.
I’m aware that, come spring, I’ll have to re-learn tennis as well, and get back into better physical shape in the process.
And I’ve been thinking a lot about how I am going to need to put in some effort if I want to get back to the level of proficiency I used to have on the musical instruments I play.
In fact, the higher the level of proficiency you once had, the longer it will take to get back to that if you’ve let it slide. Your consolation is that, if you once had a high level of mastery, it won’t take too much effort to get back to competence — in fact, you may already be close to it without even trying.
The key to avoiding frustration, I have found, is to not expect to be able to pick up where you left off. This is true even with respect to picking up where you left off yesterday. There is always a warm-up period — shorter after only a day away than after a week or a month, but present nonetheless.
After years of blogging every day, I didn’t expect to need a warm-up period for my writing session. But recently, I took a few days off. Lo and behold, my words were unwieldy and difficult to wrangle as I called them forth again, like water spitting out of a tap that hasn’t been run in awhile. After a few minutes, they started flowing more naturally, but I had to adjust my expectations.
The same thing happened when I returned to making videos after a few weeks away. And when I picked back up on using a particular piece of software. And when I started knitting again. And when I tried to dust off my Spanish skills. Every time, I felt like a beginner, but worse, because my body and mind were used to better results.
Without the many years of experience of guiding my students through the same situation, I would have been very disappointed in myself. Luckily, I knew that if I just stuck with it, I would be okay.
The older we get, the trickier this stuff can be, partly because our brains are less adaptable and partly because a decade can go by without us realizing it. I think of myself as a drummer, but I haven’t played the drums consistently in probably fifteen years. I’m now a party drummer at best, good for a song or two if no one is paying too much attention but likely unable to sustain a performance for longer than that.
Of course, if I really set my mind to it, I could change that. I’m grateful to have learned a lot of new skills in the meantime, some of which I’ve maintained better than my drumming.
And that’s another aspect of what makes it so difficult to keep up our skills as we get older: There are just too many of them. That’s a bittersweet thing, and probably an inevitable one. Then, the challenge is to decide what is most important to us and what we want to invest in.
The time that my husband and I spend playing our game on vacation will take us away from other games. It may be that some of the games on our shelf will go unplayed for so long that we will end up letting them go to a new home. Each activity we participate in comes at the cost of another.
There are no rules about what to choose and what to quit — our skills will reflect what we’ve prioritized. If we realize that we want to change that, we can. We just can’t expect to pick up where we left off, and that’s okay.
