Blogging. Well, this is something new to me, and I am aware that I approach it somewhat nervously, with the keyboard at arm’s length. I only have to look on my phone or the internet to see that for many people sharing their thoughts online is an everyday event. Rest assured, I don’t think I’ll be keeping up with them.
I do welcome having a space, though, where I can share information that I think might be useful to people, and perhaps share a little of who I am in the process. And I suppose there is something quite fitting about beginning that space by thinking about what it feels like to do something new.
When Did You Last Do Something for the First Time?
As we get older, it can become surprisingly easy to settle into the things we already know. We know what we’re good at, what we enjoy and where we feel comfortable. We may also have become quite good at avoiding the things that make us feel awkward, uncertain or a little bit vulnerable.
Doing something new asks us to tolerate not knowing. We might feel excited and curious, but we can also feel nervous, self-conscious or completely out of our depth. Sometimes all of those things can happen at once.
Children spend much of their lives being beginners. They try things they can’t yet do, get things wrong, learn something and try again. As adults, I wonder if we sometimes become less comfortable with being beginners. There can be an expectation that somehow we should already know what we’re doing.
Perhaps that’s a shame.
Trying something new doesn’t have to mean jumping out of an aeroplane or completely changing your life. It might be trying a different food, taking another route home, learning something you’ve always been curious about, going somewhere on your own, starting a conversation, picking up a paintbrush, joining a group — or, apparently, writing your first blog post.
There is always the possibility that we’ll try something and discover we don’t like it. That’s okay too. Trying something new doesn’t create an obligation to keep doing it. Sometimes “Nope, that’s definitely not for me” is useful information.
But occasionally we discover something unexpected. Perhaps something we enjoy, something we’re better at than we imagined, a different side of ourselves, or simply the rather satisfying knowledge that we were nervous and did it anyway.
So perhaps there are two questions worth being curious about:
When was the last time you did something new?
And is there something you’ve been curious about trying?
As for me, I’ve written a blog.
We’ll see what happens next.