Always being a learner

When I was in grad school, the lab computer was at a third floor window facing the university rec center.

On weekend mornings, there'd be a crowd of folks doing Tai Chi together on a lawn next to the rec center. I'd be up there analyzing data, doing labwork, or whatever would bring me into the lab. I'd wistfully look down at these folks who were being active and serene, thoughtful and clear-minded.

Why was I working in the lab on a weekend morning? I lived in family housing a short walk just down the hill. These were the days of dial-up internet, though science wasn't internet-based, except for email. (If you wanted articles, you'd have to go photocopy them from the stacks in the library.) This is where the computer was, and where my samples were, so if I wanted to get stuff done, this was the place to be. Season after season, year after year, those Tai Chi folks would be out the window. Except in winter. I wonder if they went indoors, or took some time off.

In those days I was struggling as a scientist. A good kind of struggle, in the sense that to build muscle you've got to push your muscles so that they heal to be stronger. I was learning the basic biology of my animals, I was writing my first scientific papers, I was doing data analyses and visualizations that were new to me, I was prepping my first talks for conferences. I was learning how to teach. I was getting married! I was figuring out what I was going to do when I finished up my PhD. So much was new. It was exciting, scary, and all brand new.

So when peeked down the window at the Tai Chi people, they looked gloriously peaceful. They were competent and deliberate in a manner that I could have only dreamed for myself in my own domains. I thought, "These folks must know what they're doing, if they're spending their weekends so well." It felt like we were living perpendicular lives that intersected at the laboratory window. Their lived experience could not have been more orthogonal to my own.

The idea of trying to join these folks had not even occurred to me. I felt like I had too much going on already and adding this in would only make life more complex, I would have thought if I had the wisdom to even consider the possibility.

That was then. One a late January morning, my friends helped me load up our U-haul to a postdoc.

Over the intervening years, I've steadily managed to achieve the competency and confidence of those Tai Chi folks in my own work. Taking a project from inception to communication isn't making any muscles grow, it's just a steady flow from one move to the next, a well-rehearsed set of actions. I appreciate the serenity of science. When the data come with unexplained variance and the machine doesn't work like it's supposed to, this itself is part of the dance, and I'm comfortable that I'll do the work to explain the variance and learn new things. I have no worry that I'll get the machine to work.

When I see track athletes running hurdles, I'm stunned at the grace and composure of this very specific and demanding task. Same with pole vaulting. I have to confess that for a while, I've felt this level of composure for so much of what I'm doing. Purely as a matter of repetition. While I can still be anxious and lack confidence in myself in a thousand different ways, I've been doing the science professor thing as a routine set of moves for quite a while now. I can see this might come off as a boast but I feel like it's a personal shortcoming. Because I'm not taking the steps that it takes to stretch my muscles to grow. If I'm too comfortable then I'm not increasing my capacity to serve.

So I've been working to stretch myself in a few directions. To put myself out there with the willingness to fail while trying. I've learned a whole new subfield, and I'm taking leadership roles in brand new directions to me. I'm starting to do some of the valuable stuff that that puts me in a place of discomfort.

Last weekend, I took my first Tai Chi class, approximately thirty years after first seeing those folks outside the lab window. I should have done this long ago.

Now in my early 50s, that's a feeling I'm getting all the time. I should have started doing this long ago. It's not regret, but a recognition that I have finally landed in a mode where my priorities are straight, and I am able to act with confidence in many domains and have made myself willing to be a beginner in others.

I was a total mess in this Tai Chi class. Half of us were beginners, half of us knew what we were doing. In others I could see where I was and where I wanted to be. I wished I was at the place where I was familiar with the repetitive motions, where I was able to reach the meditative state. And I also realized that the investment of effort and time into learning how to Tai Chi is part of the reward. As the cliché goes, if something is hard then that's what makes it worthwhile.

I feel like it's been a long time since I put myself in a position where I was hopelessly incompetent and poised to struggle and learn to the point where I wouldn't be embarrassingly awkward. When I started grad school, I felt like I was that way in everything I was doing. And steadily, I grew into competence and confidence. Don't get me wrong, I've been learning new tricks and expanding my repertoire. But these have mostly been variations on a theme for things that I was already good at.

So, Tai Chi was all new to me. Of course I sucked at it.

Heading home after my newbie lesson, I pondered what it might feel like to be a student doing research for the first time. I thought about when I was an undergraduate biology major and I was getting into the vocabulary of synapomorphy, sternocleidomastoid, sympathetic nervous system. When I was a pre-med and flew off to my first and last med school interview, having no idea why I was heading down one path or another.

I was a struggler, but I let that go at some point, and that was a mistake. It's easy to let all but the essentials go when you're feeling underwater with the whole sandwich generation thing. But now that I'm out of bread and I'm left with the ingredients, it's time to get back to finding some new struggles.