Almost nothing I took up this year was new. I’d assumed that rediscovering creativity meant finding something, and it turned out to mean going back for things I’d already put down and left there.
The exception was watercolor, and I chose it precisely because it is the least forgiving option on the shelf. Acrylic lets you paint over a mistake. Oil gives you days to change your mind. Watercolor gives you one pass, light to dark, and every correction stays visible as a correction.
That was the whole reason. I wanted something I couldn’t undo. I have spent a career in work whose entire discipline is making things reversible: version control, staging environments, migrations that roll back cleanly. I am good at that, and it has quietly trained me to treat every mistake as something ephemeral and temporary. Watercolor doesn’t offer that option. You either let the mark stand or you find a way to make it part of the picture, and learning to do the second thing was the actual reason I picked up a brush.
I bought a book that works through the techniques one lesson at a time, and I filled a notebook faster than I expected to. The piece I’m proudest of is a reproduction of a figure from Gray’s Anatomy, the bones of the arm with the musculature of the bicep laid over them. It turned out well. I didn’t expect to be able to say that this year about anything I painted.
What I hadn’t anticipated is how much of it is looking rather than doing. The skill being trained is noticing that a shadow isn’t gray, that it’s the color of whatever is bouncing into it, and once that’s trained it doesn’t switch off. I see more than I used to. I’d have called that precious if someone else had said it to me, and I’d have been wrong.
Both of the instruments were returns, and the distance between them is the interesting part. One I had been away from for four years. The other for more than twenty.
Twenty years is long enough that the bass isn’t really a return at all. I sat down expecting my hands to know something, and they knew nothing. Every position had to be learned as though I’d never played, which was humbling in a way I hadn’t braced for, because I had told myself I was picking something back up. I was starting. I play alone, for my own benefit, and nobody has ever had to hear it, which removes the only real pressure and leaves me with the pleasure of “just getting to play”.
The violin was the easy one, and that surprised me. I took lessons from 2015 to 2018 and then let it sit, and four years later my hands still knew where the notes were. Bow hold, the shape of the left hand, the reflex that finds third position without asking. All of it still there.
What hadn’t survived was everything above the fingers. I could still play a handful of early pieces I’d practiced into the ground, and almost nothing else. The theory was gone, and so was the ability to hear where a line wants to go and then follow it. I could produce notes and had lost the part that decides which notes, which is a strange place to be stranded: fluent in the mechanics of a language and unable to say anything in it.
That’s the challenge of picking up your abandoned past: are you inspired by what you lost or are you sorry you lost it.
Then jiu jitsu, which is the odd one out here, and the reason the rest of the year held together. It isn’t a return. It’s the one thing that has been continuous. Three years now, no gaps, which is a fairly ordinary road to a blue belt.
I did earn the belt this year, and it felt incidental. It arrived, and what I noticed wasn’t the belt but what three years of constant training had quietly done to me: sparring several times a week with the same people, for long enough that they stopped being training partners and became friends.
What the mat does is take everything else off you at the door. Nobody there cares what I do for a living, what I think about anything, or what sort of week I’ve had. We leave our problems and our preferences and our politics with our shoes. What’s left is two people trying to be a little better today than they were yesterday, and helping each other get there, because there is no other way to do it. You cannot improve at this alone. Your partner’s progress and your own are the same piece of work.
That’s where the peace came from. Not from the belt, and not from anything I worked out by myself.
It’s also the only thing on this list that stopped the solitude from being an achievement. The mats are full of people; you cannot train alone. So the year divided cleanly into hours in my own head (painting, practicing, failing at scales) and hours getting comfortably beaten up by friends, and the two turned out to need each other. The quiet was restorative because it wasn’t total. I’d have got that badly wrong with only the first half.
The obvious objection is that this is self-indulgent, a list of hobbies dressed up as growth, and that a more disciplined man would have spent the hours on something that compounds. I believed that in March. I don’t any more, and the reason is the violin.
Starting something is easy to romanticize. You’re allowed to be bad, the only direction is up, and nobody expects anything of you. That was the bass, and it was fine. Going back to something you were once better at offers none of that. You meet an earlier version of yourself who could do what you currently cannot, and you keep going anyway. That isn’t a hobby skill. That’s the skill.
And it’s the answer to the question I started the year with. You can’t go back for the things you shelved without spending real time alone with the person who shelved them, and I had been avoiding that particular meeting for about two years. It went better than expected. He’d been waiting, not sulking.
A year ago I wrote that I was still here and paying attention. I’d put it differently now. I’m somebody I’d choose to spend an evening with. I could not have said that in January, and I can say it plainly tonight.