Starting something new is necessarily like the game Boggle.
On rare occasions, new skills are learned on a graduated basis. They happen in a logical sequence where each new skill leads to the next, often involving tabbed binders and incremented progress charts, with, depending on your age and self esteem, gold stars.
Mostly, though, this does not happen.
Generally it’s like the McDonald’s playpen full of plastic balls in which you dive in and hoped they used bleach the night before. You have to trust the person teaching you. This is always a struggle for me, the idea of messy overlap, for I like to line my notebooks up on the table parallel and perpendicular to the edges; I’m the person who goes around Barnes and Noble and faces the books on the shelves. Tidy. Neat. Likey.
My first karate class several years ago was one of terror and chaos and a lot of guttural noises, with me wondering how I’d learn a second language along with the art of the open hand. Sensei had me line up with everyone and told me to just follow along. With him barking out words in Japanese and the others performing various moves and hollering at periodic moments, I felt completely overwhelmed and almost decided to not continue this new activity.
Here was a class of white belts, yellow belts, green belts, brown belts — all levels, all learning, somehow, at the same time. It was a combination of learning new and relearning old. There was humble pie for the higher levels, and over-feeding for the newbies. It was throwing the same food out there, and watching it consumed in a different way depending upon who knew how to eat it best.
Eventually, by paying attention and trusting that sensei would help me learn (he did), I found myself enjoying karate, and even taking part in a couple of tournaments after a few years. There were basics to be learned, for certain, but the experience was more about the initial leap and then scrambling to make sense of it all, finding the pattern present in which to begin learning.
Frankly, it’s easy to enjoy learning to kick ass.
Music lessons would seem a bit more logical, with the learning of notes and theory and instrument basics, but again, it’s about learning multiple things simultaneously in order to progress. Learning to fly? Reading the books and flying in the airplane and feeling like everything was happening too fast and “shouldn’t I read more out of the text before flying the plane?” and having to trust the instructor until it all started to come together.
It’s confusing, until you see the pattern.
A good teacher helps you get on the road to understanding without you even realizing your journey is underway. A good teacher helps you see the pattern. Out of what seems to be a crazy mess and jumble of non-comprehension, something of sense emerges. Stick with it, and it will all come together.
Like the game Boggle.
Tonight was the first meeting of a quasi-military search-and-rescue organization that I’ve ever attended.
