Vicissitudes
Reinvention vs. Crisis of Confidence
By Wickham Boyle
We have all noticed the phenomenon of people, mostly managers, being promoted steadily until they reach their level of incompetence. We all know bosses, friends, or co-workers who would work much more productively at a lower level, and in fact there was even a book called The Peter Principle that detailed this. I feel I have reached the Peter Principal of middle age.
I assumed as I reached a certain age I would have accumulated knowledge, acumen and skill; then at some point in my life I would just rely on my considerable skills to float along. I might have day-dreamed of being at the top of my chosen field, admired and mentoring many. Instead I changed paths and became a writer at 47. And to further exacerbate a dicey situation in the past two years, as if I was in some sort of mid life crisis quest, I have begun to take up a panoply of new pastimes.
I began playing the cello. I never played a musical instrument before; I never read music, yet here I am picking out Mozart on the bass clef. I am reading music, hovering over grace notes and attempting to find rhythm, pitch, and finesse.
I began an Italian-language class this past fall at my local community college, and am now in the second semester struggling with the vagaries of the imperfect tense and justifying male and female nouns with their corresponding adjectives. Often it seems like a crazy Italian jigsaw puzzle, and I can’t imagine ever having the fluidity to find my words in the midst of the Piazza Navona. I learned French by ear very young, but this is the first time I have attempted to learn a language with rules.
I am also taking a pottery class. One of my daughter’s friends has taken a leave of absence from college, and I promised to spend time with her taking some artsy class. We settled on pottery and have been throwing pots for the past four months. I now have some wonderfully misshapen bowls and idiosyncratic teacups with twisted handles in my cupboard. But I want more. I crave ceramic artistry. I want to be competent and centered with my clay. I desire the ability to make a beautiful shape rise on the wheel with ease while I gaze in awe at the mound transforming.
I am also learning to play poker. One of my Italian classmates is teaching me and I seem to be having a spate of beginner’s luck. I have even changed my workouts from beating myself up in aerobics, with no results, to Pilates. This is a form of internal focus and slow deep movement that has nothing to do with my natural proclivities to crash-and- burn workouts. Pilates does seem to be restoring a modicum of waistline, so I must be doing something right.
I am struggling to find places where I feel competent. On the home front, my husband seems to still love me, and I have a repertoire of successful recipes that I can whip up that, although not gourmet, puts dinner on the table most nights. But I am the mother of two adolescents, and sometimes I feel I’m incompetent in that department. I certainly don’t feel confident giving advice to my daughter, who hates college, or my son, who behaves as if he hates me.
So all of this translates to an overriding sensation that there is no quadrant of my life where I can live in my own personal, confident, competent Sea of Tranquility. Even my normal solace of reading on the couch has been tainted because reading other people’s work reminds me that I am having a crisis with my newfound métier. Reading non-fiction reminds me I can’t recall half of what I read yesterday. In Italian I can’t hold onto the endings for the future; in poker I can’t recall whether I say “check” or “call” if I want to stay in without upping the ante. I can find the most basic notes on my cello, but I have just moved into a range of higher notes, written off the staff and, quite frankly, these all look exactly the same. So I am in a flurry of incompetence
I have begun to revel in housework and my love life. Why? Because I can do a load of laundry, start a stew, pay a bill, or have an orgasm and feel competent. I can change sheets, store the woolens, take out the shorts, arrange flowers, and have another orgasm. I feel as if I know what I am doing when I write grant proposals, my former métier, or make spreadsheets, or cold-call hoped-for contributors to my local music school. But that was my past life. What have I become? I am furiously hungry to learn new things, almost in an addicted way, while at the same moment looking for calm competence. I launched myself into all these new hobbies and pastimes so that I would challenge my brain to build new furrows, so that my aging gray matter would exercise and get smarter. I wanted to develop some new skills in anticipation of old age. So I thought I should start at halfway there.
I envisioned myself playing the cello, speaking Italian, throwing pots and even playing a rip-roaring game of poker with my grandchildren. I would be upright and strong from the core I am building with Pilates and I would be writing whatever blockbuster came into my dodgy old head, all because I had changed course so dramatically at 50-something. What I hadn’t envisioned was this middle place, where I was marginally competent at just about everything as I construct my new skill set.
I suppose making any change requires being open to a feeling of incompetence. I listen to little children, hear them repeat words and phrases and see them point to everything, questioning, what and why. Seeing this innate quest to learn has given me the notion that being curious and inspired is a natural state for human beings. Maybe the luster dims as we get older because being unable to perform new tasks is unnerving.
So although today I feel as if there is no corner of my life where I am competent, valuable, or even a minor asset, I will forge ahead in the hopes that as I fall asleep the perfect set of imperfect Italian endings will waft across my relaxed brain and I will fall into a fabulous dream playing the cello, remembering well, and loving my wrinkles whereever they appear.
