The Midlife Pleasure of Being Bad at Something
My eldest remarked this week on the relentless confidence with which I belt out the wrong lyrics to songs.
This was not exactly criticism. More an observation. And, an observation with a smile.
I do not mumble the uncertain parts. I do not trail off when I arrive at a line whose meaning has apparently escaped me for thirty years. I commit. I sing with the authority of someone to whom my lyrics make sense.
There are songs I have been getting wrong since the 1980s.
I am not singing the wrong lyrics because I do not care about the song. I am singing them because the song has already become mine. The words I invented have lived in my head for decades. They have accompanied me through university parties, long drives, kitchen cleanups and the years when music was played from an actual object you had purchased and carried home.
The song and I have an understanding.
Accuracy is no longer part of it.
There is a particular freedom in being confidently bad at something when the stakes are low. It is one of the quieter pleasures of midlife.
I have been thinking about this because I took up golf this spring.
Golf is an excellent activity for anyone who has become overly attached to competence.
It is almost impossible to maintain a flattering opinion of yourself while standing over a small white ball that has no intention of going where you would like it to go.
I can understand the instruction. I can see what a proper swing looks like. I can repeat the advice to myself: loosen the grip, keep the head still, rotate through the shot, drive with your hips.
Then I swing and produce something that travels six feet forward, sharply to the right, or occasionally nowhere at all.
The ball sits there.
I sit with what has happened.
And then, every so often, I hit one properly.
The sound is different. The ball rises cleanly and sails toward something resembling the intended direction. For a brief moment, I understand why entire lives have been lost to this game.
One good shot can sustain a beginner for hours.
This is one of the things I have loved most about learning golf: it is still fun while I am learning.
That should not feel revolutionary, but it does.
Somewhere along the way, many of us learned that pleasure was meant to arrive after competence. First, you became good. Then, perhaps, you earned the right to enjoy yourself.
This is the logic of school, work, sport and nearly every organized activity of childhood. You practised, improved, advanced, performed and were evaluated. Progress was measured. Talent was identified. Potential was either fulfilled or squandered.
It is difficult to spend decades in that system without beginning to treat every new interest as another possible assessment.
Am I good at this?
Could I become good at this?
How long would becoming good take?
Would there be a certificate?
Could this, under any circumstances, become income?
Midlife offers a chance to ask a better question.
Do I like doing it?
That may be enough.
This can be surprisingly difficult for people who are used to being competent.
By this age, we know how to do things. We know how to run meetings, meet deadlines, write the difficult email, organize the dinner, find the missing document and get four people to the airport with valid passports.
We have built identities around capability.
We are the ones who know.
We are the ones who handle it.
We are the ones other people call when something has gone wrong, gone missing or requires a carefully worded response.
Competence is useful. It is also exhausting.
There is relief in entering a space where no one expects anything of you because you have no idea what you are doing.
I do not have a reputation to protect on a golf course.
No one is watching for signs of leadership potential.
There is no performance review at the end of nine holes.
My golf does not need to demonstrate discipline, ambition or personal growth. It does not need to become part of my brand. I do not need to post a quarterly update on my handicap.
I can simply be a woman in a visor playing the entire round and only ever using four clubs.
There is something luxurious about having no potential to fulfil.
This may be why beginning things in midlife feels different from beginning them when we are young.
When we are young, being bad at something can feel humiliating. We assume everyone is watching. We compare ourselves with the naturally gifted, the already experienced and the person who took one lesson and immediately developed a beautiful backhand.
We believe our early awkwardness says something permanent about us.
By midlife, we have accumulated enough evidence to know that it does not.
Being bad at golf does not mean I am bad at life.
Singing the wrong lyrics does not invalidate my education.
Failing to produce an edible tomato does not constitute a character flaw.
The stakes have finally returned to their proper size.
There is also a deep pleasure in doing something that may never become useful.
Our culture has become suspicious of unproductive interests.
A person does not simply bake bread. She considers opening a micro-bakery.
She does not paint. She builds a portfolio.
She does not write for pleasure. She launches a newsletter.
She does not go for a run. She trains.
Even hobbies now arrive with performance metrics, equipment upgrades, online communities and opportunities to optimize.
We are encouraged to convert every spark of interest into progress, every skill into a side hustle and every pleasant afternoon into content.
It can be difficult to protect an activity from usefulness.
But perhaps not everything we love must justify the time it takes.
Perhaps the time is justified because we loved it.
I do not need golf to make me fitter, more disciplined, more socially connected or more interesting at dinner parties.
It may do some of those things.
It may also make me swear quietly beside a sand trap.
Either way, the morning has been spent outdoors, walking through green space with people I like, trying to do something difficult and occasionally succeeding.
That seems sufficient.
~ Danielle
The Midlife Syllabus
Lesson #32:
Be less interested in becoming impressive and more interested in remaining interested.
Beauty, Grace & Daily Artistry
A small, imperfect pleasure:
The sun on my face and the scent of lavender wafting as I drink my morning coffee.
For five minutes I was in the South of France.
What I’m Reading, Watching or Listening to
Watching
Mbappé!