Something I Know About What I Do Not Yet Know

I posted this on my Facebook wall yesterday: “If one hopes to become good at something, one must first be willing to spend some time being not-so-good. If one wants to be strong, one must begin in weakness.”  I wrote it from a position of weakness, of not-so-goodness, and of hope.

Wednesday night I set out to run for 30 minutes straight.  I had recently run 20 minutes non-stop.  I had run 30 minutes total with brief breaks.  But 30 minutes without stopping was going to be a milestone.  It was hard.  20-some minutes in, I really wanted to stop.  In hindsight, I probably should have stopped.  My calf was bothering me some, but that was only part of the problem.  The other part was that I was tired.  I felt like I had been running for a very, very long time.  Uninvited, the thought popped to mind that not two years ago I had run for a little under four hours when I ran the Lost Dutchman Marathon.  I have twice run Chicago in around three hours and forty-five minutes.  I have run, therefore, for more than 220 minutes on multiple occasions, and yet, running for half an hour felt like an eternity. The contrast felt demoralizing.  Now, two days later, my right leg still has not recovered.  I have fallen so far.  I am still broken.

But yesterday was the ten month anniversary of my spine surgery, which means that a little less than ten months ago, I was struggling to walk in circles around the first floor of my house for a few minutes at a time.  When I was finally able to walk for more than ten minutes at a time and graduated myself to the walking track at the gym, I had to relearn how to use my right leg and how to keep my right foot pointing straight ahead of me.  I had to relearn how to use my right calf muscle and then to regrow that muscle, a process that seems still to be in progress.  And I am definitely not done regrowing the nerve that controls the outside of my right leg and foot.  I have made enormous progress.  I have been persistent and patient and brave. It’s all a matter of perspective. 

To distract myself from my tiredness and calf pain, I thought about a book I recently read called The Talent Code, by Daniel Coyle.  The first section of the book focuses on the biology of learning a skill, specifically the myelination of nerves that occurs when they are fired repeatedly.  Each firing causes a little more myelin to grow and each layer of myelin refines and speeds up the nerve impulse.  The book proposes, therefore, that all great talent begins as not-great talent that has been refined by hours and hours of practice.  Current research shows that “expert” status at any skill is only achieved after 10,000 hours of practice.  The most powerful moment in the book, for me, pointed out that in order to be great at anything, you have to slog through thousands of hours of being not-great at that thing.  Everyone who is good at something now was once not good at it.  Ability is not something we are handed on a silver platter. Ever. 

Of course, the book was not at all about people who have nerve damage or a perpetually broken foot, but it speaks to me in many other ways.  It’s OK to spend a long time learning how to run again.  More powerfully, it reminds me not to be afraid of other pursuits either. I haven’t written anything of note because I just haven’t put in the time.  The Bronte sisters, according to Coyle, spent decades writing complete crap with hokey dialogue and stolen plots before they wrote Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre. Just because I have never become good at piano does not mean that someday I might not still take it up again and, after a long, long, long time, be good at it.  I could, in theory, start either of these practices tomorrow.  The reality is that I won’t, given that I don’t even have time to sleep lately, but the possibility is always there.  I can become better at cooking, better at teaching, better at singing, better at anything.  So can my students.  So can my children. The future is bigger than I can imagine and full of possibilities, some of which I don’t even know to consider yet. I need only be willing to be not-so-good, to be weak, to be wrong, to make mistakes, and to keep trying.