On Beginners

Light Moves is a newsletter from PALTA Studio. It is personal reflections and conversations with others on the continuous process of refining the shape of life. 

And just like that, we have arrived in deep and luxurious kale season. 

It’s been a long, loping, seemingly endless summer here in the northernmost lands, week after week of sunny swimmer days and picnic afternoons lasting late into the final hours of September. 

This celestial good fortune was well timed with my executive decision to take a real old fashioned summer break as part of my new life design – the kind of summer we used to have in our adolescence when we hugged goodbye at the end of June, packed a reading list of things we’d never end up reading, and gleefully, wistfully said to each other, have a great summer, I’ll see you in the fall. 

I’m not sure when or how we decided that this was not an appropriate mechanism for the seasonality of adult life – somewhere between capitalism, corporate margins and the false belief that being in an office in July and August amounts to much more than a bunch of sweaty commutes, stock market sell offs and low morale. But as the Chief Executive and Lead Decision Maker of my studio staff of one, I crafted the critical Q3 OKR to Not Work in July and August and let me tell you, dear reader, I achieved that goal with flying colors. 

I spent most of those salty days out at the farmhouse in a low lying routine of vegetable gardening, swimming, cooking, and washing dishes because, as it turns out, a life spent puttering around the house is mostly a life spent doing dishes. But in this slow pace I was able to reflect on the midway point of this year, the first full year of what I hope to be many more years of this unusual life design I’m experimenting with, and how it’s all sitting, feeling, vibing, gelling.  

It’s made me reflect quite a lot on what it takes to be a beginner. 

To the surprise of no one and least of all myself, I am historically very bad at being not-good at new things. It stems, I think, from two personality disorders: firstly, an inherent orientation toward achievement, as any overachiever swims very uncomfortably in the dreaded “room for improvement” pool. And second, a clinical, almost cosmic propensity for impatience. 

In behavioral psychology, it’s a well studied tenet that humans are at their best when they know how long something is going to take, as a method of allaying stress and anxiety. It is why, in most modern metro stations, there is a countdown until the next train arrives – while the unknown wait time is insufferable, the mind can sort itself out to wait for 20 minutes if it knows what degree of patience must be summoned. 

I spent the first 35 years of my life notoriously impatient – impatient to get going, impatient for what’s next, impatient to move on. If you’re lucky, the byproduct of impatience is productivity, when the time between idea, action, and outcome compresses continuously into swift, dopamine-laden drumbeats of results. I have always credited my productivity, efficiency, and general life velocity to my impatience – it served me well in a life oriented around western ideals, capitalist career trajectories, and standardized structures for achievement. Bigger, better, faster, stronger, as the saying goes.

But as the last few years have centered my focus on beginning big things for the very first time – owning a home, starting a business, career pivots and life upheavals – I’ve been struck at how long and unexpectedly incremental the road to feeling some sense of milestone achievement has been. Many times I thought surely I had made the full circle journey from idea spark to getting going to seeing the potential benefits of my undertaking, only to realize later that had merely been the first shoulder of the long journey I’d eventually make. 

Take, for example, this summer. This delicious summer was my fourth year of owning the farmhouse. It was by all measures the best, most enjoyable year of homeowning I’ve experienced yet. It was the first year in four years that I wasn’t recovering from a large scale construction project and the hangover that ensues. I had by this point dealt with all of the low hanging crises imaginable, experienced four years of seasonal turnover and understood, with multiple sets of datapoints in my pocket, what resources were required of me as a homeowner to keep this thing afloat. While always a lot of work to maintain, the house project was no longer stressful but rather operationally humming along. 

Without fanfare, in year four I had quietly transitioned from being a beginner into some new phase, a phase that now had a bank of experience and knowledge to rely on, instincts about what would come next and how to carry on. I was in control of this unruly project I’d embarked on and it was blissful. Unexpectedly, I had become a happy homeowner. 

So what if I told you, as you debated buying a summer cottage for the very first time, that it’d be the best addition to your life, a chapter that practically felt predestined in your life story, but you would have to spend four years powering through the unknown to get there? 

Being, as it were, patient, so very patient, for an undetermined, impossible to know, unguaranteed length of time, to eventually unlock a level of contentment of which you have no reference point? What mad person would opt to take this pill?

And yet, this fall, I am embarking once again on a very new type of project that I am entirely a beginner at. I am confronted with a familiar funny feeling, the unknown variable that accompanies a new idea: how long might this take before I’ll know if the juice was worth the squeeze?

For to be a beginner is an exercise in abundant, near spiritual levels of faith, faith sprung from a well of excitement and hope that this thing you’ve decided to attempt and the journey you are embarking on may very well be the beginning of the next best thing that could happen to your life, with no real understanding of the probability of that being true at all. 

So often we ascribe being a novice, an amateur, a beginner as a negative – someone with a lack of skill or experience to understand what’s required to achieve results. But I’m finding a newfound affection for it, the remarkable imagination and steadfastness required by beginners to believe that happiness and success and a sense of accomplishment sit just around the bend of a circle the size of which you do not know, cannot know, until you’ve made the full turn.

 Patience, darling. Patience. 

Things that helped shape these thoughts:

• Rediscovering a 1995 Emmylou Harris classic

• The large stack of books on my summer reading list I never read

• This interview with Sally Rooney, on the eve of her new book release, and why she believes doing more of what you know is just fine