Getting Boring Is Not Part of Growing Up

Watch a seven-year-old at a playground. She climbs the slide the wrong way, slips, laughs and goes again. Now watch the grown-ups on the bench: coffee, phone, the occasional “Be careful.” Somewhere between the slide and the bench, most of us decided that being an adult meant we were done being beginners. Done trying things we might be bad at. Done looking silly where anyone could see. Dancing is for weddings, after the second drink, and even then only as a joke.

We call it maturity. A lot of the time it’s actually just the fear of looking foolish. The responsibilities are real: the bills, the kids, the job. But none of them asked us to stop trying new things: a website we’d have no idea how to build, a language class where we’d sound like a toddler, putting something we poured a lot of effort into where people could see it. We dropped those for a different reason. Being a beginner is embarrassing, and grown-ups arrange their lives so they never have to be one again.

This doesn’t wait for fifty, either. Plenty of people in their twenties are too cool for anything earnest, keeping a life too polished to risk a clumsy first try. Meanwhile somebody in their seventies is signing up for a first dance class. It’s a choice that looks like a stage of life, and it adds up. A life rarely shrinks all at once. It shrinks one inner comment at a time. “Nah, I’ll look stupid.” “I’m no good at things like that.” “I don’t understand that stuff.” “Aren’t you a little old for this?” That voice sounds like maturity. It’s the inner critic, and it’s very good at its job. It keeps you from ever looking foolish, and from ever finding out what you might have loved.

Growing up handed you the keys. Getting boring is leaving the car in the driveway. Live with Purpose doesn’t mean serious or grim. Joy and wonder are part of the purpose, and being awake includes being awake to them: the ridiculous, the clumsy, the stuff you’re bad at and love anyway. Think about what being grown actually gave you. You can drive anywhere you like. You have some money of your own, hopefully. You can have a glass of wine with dinner, as long as somebody else is driving home. Nobody is standing over you saying no anymore. We spent our whole childhood waiting for that freedom. A grown-up who can still be a beginner gets the best of both: the fearlessness of a seven-year-old and the car keys.

This weekend, think of one thing you’d have done at ten without thinking twice, or one thing you’ve wanted to try and talked yourself out of. Racing somebody to the end of the block. Climbing the hill instead of admiring it. Signing up for the beginner class where you’d be the worst one there. Learning a few words of the language for the trip you keep talking about. Dancing at the wedding before the second drink. Putting the thing you made where people can see it. Now set the fear and the self-consciousness aside for a minute and picture yourself actually doing it. Not the planning, the doing: what it looks like, how it feels to be bad at it out loud. Then listen for the voices that showed up while you pictured it. “Nah, I’ll look stupid.” “Aren’t you a little old for this?” Those are the ones keeping you on the bench. Recognizing them is the first bit of waking up, and it’s how you start. You may find the grown-up was the only one standing in the way.