Surf, swim, sing: Finding joy in lifelong learning in ‘Beginners’

After seeing his young daughter learn to play chess, travel writer Tom Vanderbilt wondered “Why not me?” So he did – and then learned six more skills.

In the new year, people resolve to improve themselves: Quit being so snarky, eat more kale, learn the trombone!

But travel writer Tom Vanderbilt didn’t wait for a new year to shake up his world. After watching his daughter learn to play chess, he decided to join her. Emboldened by the experience, Vanderbilt started on his own adult-ed study, learning to sing, surf, swim, juggle, draw, and create jewelry.

In “Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning,” he describes frankly (and humorously) the embarrassment that comes with repeated failures as well as quiet triumphs. His aim is to understand what it means for a middle-aged man to learn new skills, and, deeper still, how learning happens. “It’s about small acts of reinvention, at any age, that can make life seem magical,” he writes.

Vanderbilt isn’t looking for a bucket list or something to crow about on social media; he wants skills he can relax into and slowly develop over a lifetime. He hires teachers, joins groups, and interviews experts. 

To learn how to sing, he engages a voice teacher, who assuages his fears about his ability: Yes, she says, your voice may have certain parameters, but it’s still trainable. “You should walk into this completely open and think of it as a joyful experience,” she tells him. Good advice for learning anything new.

He next joins a local group, the Britpop Choir. The joy is transcendent. The ensemble turns from a mismatched collection of singers to one unified voice. And he finds more than just a good vocal workout. “Before I knew it, the Britpop Choir was fulfilling any number of needs in my life. There was the simple getting out of the house, being among people, working on something that wasn’t work.”

Then Vanderbilt takes up surfing in the cold waters of the Rockaways in New York. From the “pop up” from prone position to upright on the board, he learns how to read the signs of the ocean and catch waves. He takes his family to Costa Rica, where he attends a surfing camp and discovers that it’s a serious pursuit. To get better quicker, he is told he needs to “treat surfing as a sport, with all the tools that entails: a rigorous, thoughtful skills development plan; video feedback and analysis; and drills.”

After many missed waves and wipeouts, his first big Costa Rican wave, “was just sheer, stupid bliss,” he recalls. 

He notices that the 40-somethings in the camp are learning more than surfing. “These were people who’d temporarily abandoned the safe harbors of adulthood – their bankable competency at work, the familiar rationalizations of what was age appropriate, that fallback move of relinquishing the idea of growth to their children – to take part in a challenging, risky, and maybe even futile endeavor.” 

He finds out the key to learning new things is shifting the focus off yourself. With surfing, he learns to look at the shore, not his feet or board. When he takes up juggling, he learns that jugglers don’t look at the balls, they watch the apex of where things are thrown. As he adds balls, he learns that time slows down, especially if you stop thinking.

When he starts taking drawing classes, that state of “not thinking” comes into play as well. Claude Monet counseled, “try to forget what objects you have before you, a tree, a house, a field, or whatever. Merely think, here is a little square of blue, here an oblong of pink, here a streak of yellow, and paint it just as it looks to you.”

Over the course of his learning crusade, Vanderbilt works through his own perfectionism and judgment, acknowledges mistakes and keeps trying. 

He didn’t win any prizes or break new ground – nor was that the intention. He gained “modest competency.” “But doing these things,” he writes, “brought me an immense and almost forgotten kind of pleasure.”

Perhaps he will encourage you to spend 2021 finding delight in honing new or forgotten skills. “It takes the whole of life,” he quotes Seneca, “to learn how to live.”