My friend is trying to convince me to go to the climbing wall with her. I don’t dislike rock-climbing. I grew up doing it as part of hill-walking with an adventurous dad who saw no reason why being a child should stop you free-climbing any rock face that happened to be between you and the summit, and at the time, in most weathers, I agreed with him. But something about indoor climbing puts me off. The holds are arranged to be more or less challenging, according to a hierarchy of skill. I don’t enjoy games or puzzles, the premise that someone else has laid a trail, or possibly a trap, that there is a competition I should win and will probably lose. It doesn’t feel playful and I’d rather be outside. Let’s go for a walk instead, I say, or we’ll climb a mountain if you want altitude, and she agrees because she’s nice but we both know that she doesn’t really want a walk or a mountain because these last few weeks the climbing wall calls her every day.
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Most of my hobbies are life-long, often hereditary, interests. I’ve been knitting and sewing since before I could read, running for 30 years. I’ve liked archaeology since childhood. My complicated love affair with hiking began when I began to walk, and I’ve been baking since I was too young to be handling a hot oven. My fidelity means that I have some expertise and assurance in these activities. Knowledge and experience accrue. Things that were hard become easier and things that were impossible become merely hard. Confidence builds, being good at things brings pleasure, an apparently virtuous circle in which I go on doing the things I do well, and I do well because I’ve gone on doing them.
My friend – we’ll her call Jen – does not do this. Her passion for indoor climbing dates back about three weeks. She is much better at it than she was three weeks ago, but unsurprisingly still a beginner. It’s unlikely that she will become expert or assured because Jen moves on. Soon after she could roller-blade the length of Sandymount Strand, the boots fell into disuse and were wearily received by the local Oxfam shop, who had seen a few roller-blades in recent months. Jen had spotted a tango class and remembered that she’d always fancied tango. She enjoyed the beginners’ class, but after the first intermediate course it was less fun. Before you accuse Jen of being a dilettante, I’ll say that she writes long, complex, thoroughly-researched books, the sort that take years to do properly, and has degrees you don’t get by messing about. She’s no lightweight. In her leisure time she likes to be a beginner, to be at the fumbling, goofy, fast-learning stage of a new skill. Mastery bores her. She’s not interested in coming top. She has the unusual and precious gift of taking pleasure not only in difficulty – plenty of us do that – but in incompetence. She is perhaps the only person I know who truly loves the process of learning and is able to delight in it without glancing towards the reward of achievement, which is a close cousin of superiority.
I think about Jen as I practice my own latest hobby, which is the yoga I started three years ago in the wake of rather thorough mental breakdown. It’s hard not to want to be “good at” yoga, and not to think that being good at yoga means being able to get into and hold challenging poses. It’s hard, sometimes, not to want to be stronger or more flexible than the irritatingly beautiful person at the end of the row, or even not to want to be better at some absurd and wholly redundant skill such as standing on your head (I can) or getting your knee over your shoulder (never going to happen). Needless to say, the mental health benefits of yoga do not derive from contortions. Jen’s apparently effortless practice of joyful incompetence sets an example it’s difficult to match. Maybe there’s a limit to how hard a person should try not to try hard, but I suspect not; I suspect that the effort not to make an effort is a life’s work.
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