In middle age, getting good at something new is the name of the game

I had one wish for my birthday this past week, and that was to play pickleball with friends. Because, I mean, it’s pickleball! The most fun sport ever invented.

A few years ago, our church painted pickleball lines on the gym floor and my life was forever changed. A group of us, mostly ladies but also a few guys, began to play every week.

We were terrible at first — couldn’t serve, couldn’t rally, kept stepping in the kitchen or forgetting to let the ball bounce on the return of serve.

And how on earth did the scoring work? 

But the great thing about pickleball, and the reason it has swept our nation, is because you can get relatively good in a short amount of time. 

I am proud to say that my little band of friends has become quite adept at pickleball. The best among us have become jaw-droppingly good, and the worst among us can now hit some killer shots.

Everyone, that is, except me. I don’t have lightning-fast reflexes or the fall-on-my-sword competitive nature required to excel. When I hit a good shot, we all cheer in surprise.

I am truly terrible at pickleball. But I still adore it.

What I’ve had to square, as an adult, is loving something that I am not good at and coming back to it again and again, with only marginal hope for improvement.

As children, we are given blanket permission to try everything. The world gives us crayons to scribble and balls to bounce and pianos to plunk and empty pages to fill, and we are encouraged to try it all. There is a nested hope in every parent, teacher and child that they might witness the unfurling of the next Claude Monet, Caitlin Clark, Frédéric Chopin or Jane Austen.

But as we get older, reality sets in. The cement around our own limiting beliefs begins to harden. We lose an art competition and decide we’re terrible at drawing. We go an entire season of sixth grade basketball without scoring a single point. The interest in piano wanes and is replaced by the violin, then the guitar and finally the anonymity of the school choir. The unfinished manuscripts sit in the drawer, while the finished ones receive only rejection. (All of these stories are true, true, true.)

Quite suddenly, we find ourselves in middle age, slightly above average at many things, and hesitant to take up new skills and hobbies, because there is a saturation point for how much the bruised ego can absorb.

But that is such a fixed mindset! We can be our own worst enemies. It takes a great amount of confidence to be bad at something and do it anyway. This is why, as a spectator at races, I always cheer loudest for the people at the back of the pack. I want to celebrate every self-published novel written by a retired accountant. I marvel at women like my paternal grandmother, who took up oil painting in her 60s.

In my younger dancing days, I was in a mixed-age modern class. One of the dancers was a big burly man, well over 6 feet. I’m not sure what he did as a day job. It could have been construction, or maybe he was a body double for Andre the Giant. He was kind and funny, but he couldn’t put two combinations together or keep any sort of rhythm. When we turned left, he went right. At 14, I couldn’t fathom what he was doing there.

But now I get it. 

One thing I’ve realized as I stand firmly in middle age is that you don’t die all at once, but by degrees. One day you can run eight miles. The next, you find that a form of exercise you always loved has torched your feet. There will be no more races. But there is swimming. And maybe a person can learn to love the stationary bike.

At 50, your throwing arm is gone. Your football days are behind you, and pickup basketball has taken your knees. But there is dance, even if the teacher has to hide you in the back row.

For every form of you that dies, you must have a rebirth in a new direction. That’s how you stay alive.

So, I keep showing up to pickleball with my fancy paddle and my beautiful court shoes. Sparkly equipment cannot mask my shortcomings. But I will dink and lob and volley and drive and maybe through my own mediocrity, with the help of some great friends, I can achieve immortality.