Counting on Beginner Brain

How else can we invite renewal?

Happy spring, my friends! I hope you’re enjoying the show as nature emerges from its winter nap.

My best friend and I used to mark this time of year by meeting halfway between our homes to spend the day together at Longwood Gardens in Kennett Square, PA. What a gift to take a break from our daily work to stroll the beautiful grounds and catch up with each other.

photo credit: Tori Bond

One year we happened to witness what seemed like an obscene act: they were pulling up all the tulips and dumping them in a pile for disposal. They do this annually, the gardener told us, to ensure the garden’s vibrancy. Over the past several centuries, hybridization has assured that tulips produce a glorious showing on year one—but after that, the bulb's ability to come back year after year is weakened.

We humans can relate to the slow fading over time. Later this year, I’ll turn 70—according to sciencealert.com, that’s twice the age when humans reach their physical peak. A study in the journal Intelligence hands our brains a bit more grace: overall psychological functioning peaks between ages 55 and 60. But both my parents had dementia in their early eighties. Does this mean I’m screwed?

Aging with grace—or fading?

After gaining some ground over the inflammation I’ve been battling the past three years, I’m choosing to think that my fate is not yet written in stone. I’ve been making more conscious choices as concerns nutrition, daily exercise, stress reduction, and social stimulation.

Perhaps most importantly, I’ve also been cultivating my beginner brain. Articles I’ve read say that learning new skills as you age creates new neural pathways in the same way that exercise increases the peripheral arteries that help one survive a heart attack.

I have done this through language lessons. Six years ago, when my eldest married a woman from France, I began French. I still struggle to understand it at conversational speed. At a recent meeting of our local chapter of the Alliance Française, I could have sworn that the woman presenting had said that the Alsace region of France was located at the intersection of France, Germany, Switzerland…and Istanbul.

Fact check: Istanbul is a 23-hour drive from Alsace. Oops. Many of the fluent (and less geographically challenged) French speakers got a good laugh out of that malentendu. Not in mockery, but in recognition. There was a time when they were beginners, too.

Now, my younger son is dating a woman whose parents are Chinese, and since my nephew is married to a Chinese woman… Yep, you guessed it.

[Answer: shǒujī, which means cell phone.]

After only a few months of effort, it’s abundantly clear that if I want to have a decent command of Mandarin, my brain will be bushwhacking new neural pathways throughout my 70s. And not just because of the way it’s written—I was thrilled to learn and apply a new alphabet when taking Russian for seven years in high school and college. (Who could foresee that my future stepdaughter’s husband, a Ukrainian immigrant, would speak it?)

The main challenge is psychological. For a “recovering” (haha) perfectionist to submit to being a beginner requires radical self-acceptance at a time of life when it would be so much easier to float along, buoyed by previous accomplishment.

There are no laurels on which to rest when learning a brand-new skill. Chinese requires sounds and intonations I’ve never created before. But should I ever meet the parents of my son’s girlfriend, and am able to whip out a sentence full of conversational depth such as “This is hot soup,” I look forward to the smile of recognition with which it will be met.

My perspective may be skewed by our unusually global family, but I wish that more people would continue to study languages as they age. For mental fitness, yes, but also to diminish xenophobia. It’s too easy to write off others as ignorant when you can’t understand the sounds coming from their mouths. Learning languages can build a bridge capable of spanning oceans.

I have a good role model for tolerating beginner brain in my husband, Dave, who still finds meaningful challenge in working full-time with special-needs high-schoolers. His goal is to meet them where they are, every changing day, even though some of them are nonverbal or communicate in ways that are challenging to decipher. Later this year, Dave turns 80.

I know there are no guarantees. But despite the wear and tear on his body from a valiant 25-year battle with heart disease and cancer, my dad stayed vibrant after retirement with piano lessons and poetry classes at a local college. Something’s always going to get us in the end.

Vibrancy is my goal, too. I hope to achieve renewal by planting new tulips. By waking up my beginner brain. The risk of failing dares us to draw afresh on the qualities we’ve spent a lifetime building.

I know full well that through story, both writers and readers are on a lifelong learning mission. What other ways have you challenged your beginner brain? I’d love to hear about it.

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Where to find me!

My year is filling with opportunities to share the ideas I developed in my book Crafting Story Movement: Techniques to Engage Readers and Drive Your Novel Forward. Here’s what’s on the near horizon:

April 7: Main Line Writers Group, Haverford, PA

April 23: Women’s Fiction Writers Retreat East, Alexandria, VA

May 15–16: Pennwriters Conference, Lancaster, PA

November 4: Northern Tier Providers Coalition Conference, Clayton, NY

November 17: Brandywine Valley Writers Group, West Chester, PA

If you belong to a writing group and would like me to meet with you in person or via Zoom, please reach out!

May we all bloom this year,

Kathryn 🌷