On Being A Beginner

Photo by Tomasz Filipek on Unsplash

Hello, my friends! I suppose some of you noticed that I took an unannounced break from this newsletter over Labor Day weekend. It wasn’t planned, but when it happened I figured that most of you were too busy with a hamburger or hotdog to really notice or care, and left it that way.

I have just wrapped up training for my new job and am now flying solo. I’ve enjoyed what I’ve learned so far. Mainly I hope that my brain is not a sieve through which the more important bits of information will pass, leaving only the useless ones like: “you don’t need a permit to own a potbelly pig.” It is an interesting, social, ever-changing job with a community focus and I expect to like it quite a lot.

---

How long has it been since I started a job that asks me to learn at a rapid pace? That’s what I asked myself at the end of this training. Of course there are some jitters. But truthfully, I find myself the same kind of exhilarated as when I worked at a fine dining restaurant. My chef directed me to sense the temperature of chocolate against my bottom lip in order to temper it. The chocolate must cool to a perfect 86 degrees Fahrenheit, and he wouldn’t buy me a candy thermometer. It was something, he said, that I must learn to feel with accuracy in my body: a tool I would always have with me, even when tool went missing.

And each time I am thrown into something unfamiliar and manage to make my way, the same feeling emerges: what a triumph it is to feel lost, then to figure out a functional way through the task. You did that - just you and your brain: a piece of yourself that is suited to learning new skills and information, whether you have recently asked it to or not.

This is an important aspect of being a human: agreeing that you are new at most things and that most of us, really, are not experts at more than a thing or two.

Don’t misread me - I like to think that I am good at several things and I frankly hate the knowledge that I am not yet good at this job. But how could I be? I have had two weeks of training, prior to which I barely knew a thing about the job, let alone its finer functions. Common grace is this: we live with the self-compassion to say, “I am still learning.”

“I’m still learning” is a phrase I try to embody. It saves me from my inner perfectionism; the part of me that feels there is no excuse for not getting it right the very first time. I am not perfectionistic about anything except the standard to which I hold myself, a quality (I assume) from the fact that my enneagram 7 self descends toward the harder lines of 1 in stress. But when I expect to be a student and not a graduate, I find that my need for perfection loosens its grasp.

“I’m still learning,” when I get news from my doctor that delays hoped-for treatments.

“I’m still learning,” when I stand at the gym in front of a machine I’m not sure how to use.

“I’m still learning,” when I read a book or a social media post or an article that challenges my viewpoints.

“I’m still learning,” when I respond with less grace than I want to in a terse interaction with my husband or a family member.

“I’m still learning,” when I leave at home the very things I went out on errands to do.

“I’m still learning,” when I try something like drinking less caffeine, or beginning to read a book before bed.

I like to think that this phrase is full of courage and purpose too, because it is very different from the attitude that says, “I don’t know that.”

“I don’t know that,” has finality. It comes with a full stop, an exclamation point, a clear decision to step away from any idea of continuing on. “I’m still learning,” to me, has the opposite tone. It reminds me that although I don’t know, I might know it in the future, and I am actively looking to grow my understanding.

And I, for one, love learning. If I had all the time in the world - probably several lifetimes’ worth - I would learn as many things as I could. I would learn multiple languages, oil painting, mythology, pottery, ceramics, historic restoration, horseback-riding, gardening, poetry, bird-watching, and archeology. I would learn to knit Fair Isle sweaters, illustrate books, work with wood, make toys, interior design, practice film photography, mapmaking, astronomy, sailing, and costume-design. I’d master survival skills, nature studies, the cello and the mountain dulcimer, shoe-making, or maybe apprentice to learn violin-making in Cremona, or book-binding. There are so many things I have not yet learned and I’m interested in nearly all of them.

The Norfolk botanical garden offers many evening classes, and though I have not gone to more than one or two, I’m always happy to see a classroom full of grown adults who have also chosen to take the posture of a student. There are a hundred things one can do on a Tuesday evening, but I love the people who decide they’d like to be here, necks craned skyward on an “owl prowl” for sheer fun.

Of course curiosity is alive and well in the world of food. One of the fundamental aspects of modern food-culture is innovation, and innovation insists is that there is always something new to be learned or created. Some of my happiest moments with food friends are when we are throwing around ideas, or one person is describing a new piece of information to the rest of us who are hanging on their every word.

One of the food-world people who inspires me with their curiosity is actually here on Substack! Kitchen Projects by Nicola Lamb is a place where I learn something new in every time her work lands in my inbox. Nicola’s inquiring mind is infectious - she is forever taking something apart bit by bit or (literally) building it from the table up, as in this week’s Roman-inspired pavlova, complete with piped meringue columns. On Instagram, Nicola worked out the architecture of such a feat (how do you get brittle meringue pillars to hold the weight of a fruit tableaux?) by dedicating several days of crumbling effort to get it just right. I found myself captivated by her process of trial and error, and her determination to make good on her vision.

I don’t often write about my family, so some of you might not know that I am the second oldest of a group of nine siblings. I like many things about us, but one of my favorite things is that each and every one of the bunch loves to learn. An example: as I worked on this newsletter, I pulled up Instagram to find that my older brother had, in the past week, learned how to make pop-art prints from old issues of Vogue, and how to make a torch a la Indiana Jones. (You know, as one does as a father of three with all that delicious spare time.)

The moral of this story? Stay curious. Stay humble. Stay certain that for all the things you know, there are thousands others that you are still learning. There is magic in this attitude. You will meet incredible people, do incredible things, never regret how you spent your days, and feel a sense of youthfulness that everyone else graduated from when they put away their willingness to learn. And, I don’t know, maybe it’s just nicer to think that of all the wonderful things you know so far, there are even more wonderful things yet to come?

I’m still learning.

And I hope you are too.

Till next time,

Rachel