On Sunday afternoons for the past few weeks, I’ve been taking a class at Baltimore Clayworks. Spinning bowls out of mud has turned out to be far more challenging than a person who has seen Ghost might expect it to be. When another young woman pulled out her much advanced vase work, I had that same exciting/overwhelming realization I had when I was 8 and about 6 months into violin lessons: If this was going to happen, it was going to be a long, hard road.
But at 31 years old, this felt like a much more daunting proposition. Committing years to educating myself on any topic seemed too audacious, and–Yikes!–did I just type that? Even if it took me 12 years to master clay as it did the violin (as much as I was going to personally master the instrument, I mean), at 43 I hope I’d still have quite a few years of coffee mug production in me to make it worth the while.
My college career was brief, and though sometimes I still wish I’d stuck around in academia longer, I really can’t see going back to formal study at this point. But I’d like to think I’m still hungry to learn and capable of committing myself to projects that require serous intellectual investment. If that’s going to happen, though, I’m probably going to have to start by learning to stop thinking that I’m too old for anything but short cuts.
**No Knead French bread: Most of the quality, 1/4 of the energy. Maybe this is where the bad influence comes from.
My mother has a useful perspective and a stock answer for the complaint that, “by the time I finish [whatever], I’ll be [X] years old”:
You’ll be that old whether you do it or not.
Molly admits: Touché! Good one…