What happens when we let ourselves be bad at something

Trying, finally, to enter the rabbit hole

Don Cherry and Ornette Coleman, 1959

Dear friend,

Over the past two weeks, I’ve been gathering people in my Brooklyn apartment to try an experiment. For two hours, we let ourselves be bad at something. Without judgement. Without pressure. Without a clear goal.

So far, it’s made two things very clear to me:

1. Goddamn is it rare and difficult to let ourselves be beginners as adults.

2. Goddamn is it freeing when we do it.

The gathering, Curiosity Lab, has a seemingly simple structure: come with something you want to practice, or have always wanted to try but never have. For two hours, participants sprawl across my living room with mugs of tea, and we each unfurl into our own practices. One person loops metal into chainmail, another draws, someone else writes queer fanfiction, while I, for the first time, let myself actually try to make music.

The aim here is to allow ourselves to meander with a kindergarten mindset. So often everything around us demands a controlled presentation of self. Here we attempt to surrender to the discomfort of beginnerhood, to sit softly with the dimension of ourselves that doesn’t have everything figured out. As I sat there hitting notes on a keyboard that’d been sitting in my closet for years, I unexpectedly felt tears well up. The part of me that had desired trying this for so long was finally getting the space to exist. To arrive, it just needed permission to show up as play, rather than a specific, pressurized outcome.

For years I’ve dreamed about making music. I’ve replayed the same fantasies like well-worn CDs, spun up the exact image and sound I want to hear, have got the music videos I’d make down to a scene by scene art direction. I slip into the daydream and my body erupts with goosebumps, a temporary wind singing in my chest. The desire to make music is there, beaming and true and awaiting my actualization with eager eyes.

But it my mind the wind remains, stills. I’ve never actually taken this desire’s hand and led it out the door into being.

Now I could tell you it’s because I didn’t have the time, or the focus, or the right equipment. But friend, that wouldn’t be honest. I’ve been avoiding making music because I didn’t want to sit in the reality of not knowing what the hell I was doing. I’d put such pressure on the dream of making songs to be an expression of my creative being that I didn’t want to face the possibility of “Oh. I’m really not that good at this.”

Desire is a signal to what lights our hearts up. When we immediately give it a contract that in order to exist, it first must meet our bars of good, unique, or actualized, it curdles. A self-rupture breaks.

The pressure put on making music being “successful” made that any risk of that dream’s collapse was unbearable. It was safer to stay in the daydream realm where I was already good, where beginnerhood was a level long passed, rather than face the risk of failure, confusion, or mediocrity.

This experiment has been a study of surrender. What happens when we give our unknowning space to breathe? Can we be a safe place for our lack of clear path to exist?

The late Idrissa Ouédraogo in the documentary Ouaga, Capitale du Cinéma (2000), dir. Mohamed Challouf.

Recently, I returned to an essay by David Farrier on Desire Paths, who notes:

“Paved roads show us where we ought to go, but desire paths are made when we step off the road and let our hearts decide the way. They seek out the most direct connection between where we are and where we wish to be. Worn by the pressure of passing feet, they’re declarations of a kind: there is another way.”

Can I find another way with you? Can we explore what it looks like to love the process as much as the output? Can we let our desires exist without expectation to delight any one else’s sense but our own? Can we hold our unknowing softly?

Over these weeks, I’ve seen how transformative it is to interrupt the pressure loop that prevents so many of us from the vulnerability of trying. The delight and ease that unfurls when we give ourselves wider pastures to roam through.

A graphic I made on Mitchel Resnick’s “Kindergarten Approach to Learning”

This week, I challenge you to engage in a curiosity practice. Set 30 minutes aside to practice anything you’re curious about, without the pressure of it to look “good” or “finished.” Note what arises, without judging those risings. Do you notice any tensions in your body? Are there any hidden contracts you’re holding that are preventing you from walking alongside your curiosity? What is the texture of your discomfort? What is it revealing about what you need more of less of?

I’ll be continuing to experiment, and sharing what arises on the playground.

with many young leaves,
annika

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If this is calling to you, Curiosity Lab is happening again next week in Brooklyn, and in the weeks to come. It’s a small, living room gathering for qtbipoc folks to come with something we’re curious about, and let ourselves be new at it.

If you want to join us, you can sign up here. I’d love to have you.

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🌿 Field Note

Something that recently sparked my curiosity

I’ve been reading Cosmic Music: The Life, Art and Transcendence of Alice Coltrane and I’m deeply into it. I’ve long looked to Alice Coltrane as a teacher on craft as devotion, and what it means to be in service of that as opposed to output for output’s sake. Highly recommend adding to your bookshelf.

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💿 What I’m Listening To

A playlist for you, for moments of ease and mornings carried by slowness