I’ve recently segued into a new life season that’s defined by enthusiastic experimentation. This follows a period more focused on reassessment, refurbishment, and reinforcement.
I’m familiar with this sort of transition (from previous phases of the same), so I’m aware (at least in the broad strokes) of what it entails, and I’m priming myself accordingly.
Instead of doubling-down on what’s been working, in these sorts of moments I tend to make comparably off-the-wall and orthogonal-seeming investments of my time, energy, and resources.
Rather than craving chilled-out routines and scaffolding-like rituals, I start looking for ways to insert randomness into my life; not because those routines and rituals are no longer valuable, but because I’m keen to see how they might evolve into new iterations, and to test what other kinds of things they might support.
These sorts of interstitial intervals tend to be exciting, but also uncomfortable.
That’s literally true at the moment, as one of the first things I started fiddling with as I began this current segue was my workout routine, and now that I’ve completely upended what I was doing—replacing consistency and stability with something more challenging, varied, and unfamiliar—I’m sore pretty much all the time, and near-constantly googling twinges and impairments to determine if they’re age-related, or if they’re connected to one of the new growth-inducing frictions I’ve undertaken in recent months.
When immersing myself in a deluge newness—portions of my life suddenly alien, my actions toddler-like amidst unlimited potential for missteps and injuries—I try to embrace my naïveté as an opportunity to see things afresh, and to question not just the extrinsic structures of my life, but also my internal self: the fundaments of what make me, me.
I also try to remind myself (because each experiment offers countless excuses to give up or otherwise recoil) that I’m not going to be good at anything I try, not at first, and perhaps not for a while; there’s a chance I won’t ever be good at them.
“Good” in this sense, though, is a fuzzy word, and it’s within my power to define it however I choose.
In general, I find, it’s useful to think in terms of what’s “good for me” and all my personal specifics as an individual, rather than “good” compared to other people, or in the context of the full range of possible outcomes.
This encourages productive self-comparison (doing better than my previous best, over time), while also leaving room for other metrics of success: “good” might mean “I have fun performing this activity,” or “this gets me out of the house and amongst people on a regular basis,” rather than requiring some specific level of competitive performance to be enjoyable and useful.
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