A New Year Idiot

The term “wild ride” doesn’t quite cover the last half of 2013 – I graduated business school, had a baby, moved states, bought a house (+ 2 cars), and started a new job all within 4 months. As I begin to emerge from the sleep-deprived haze of newborns (now that she is sleeping through the night, hallelujah – let me say it again, hallelujah), I am picking up a few things that were dropped by the wayside: this blog included. 

So, I would like to open 2014 posts with a declaration of my goal this year: to feel like an idiot.

Wait, what?

Right. To feel like an idiot. To explain this, let me first take a brief detour: during business school – which I attended on Saturdays while working full time – an alum explained the experience to me like this:

Every week you are juggling several balls. Your work, your family, your social life, school, hobbies. As you juggle, realize that one of those balls is made of glass. It absolutely cannot be dropped. The trick is that which ball is made of glass changes every week – you have to figure out what can slide and what must be absolutely protected in order to avoid disaster.

The first six months of parenthood made all of the juggling balls seem like glass (though likely that was a sleep deprivation haze talking, where everything seemed harder than it would have been otherwise). That fog has started to lift, and in figuring out how to prioritize spending some of my (limited) free time, I decided to give martial arts a try. Something I’ve always wanted to do, but have zero experience in – with the added benefit of helping lose that bit of lingering baby weight.

Queue class #1 last week: the adult-only classes (I didn’t want to start out in a class full of literal 4 year olds) are mixed skill level, and as I look around I see 7 other students: 3 black belts, a brown belt, and 3 blue belts. Oh yeah – and me. Ummmmm. Thankfully there were 2 instructors there, so one took pity on me and spent most of the class giving me one-on-one instruction. Results: felt completely lost in class, sore for three days afterwards. Other results: I plan on going back.

Why? 

As I struggled to keep up in class, learn Korean terms (it’s a tae kwon do studio) and new body movements while the other adults flew around like Gumby on steroids, I realized that it had been much too long since I had tried something where I had no idea what I was doing. That kind of mental challenge (and resulting humility!) was somehow simultaneously exhausting and refreshing, and I am resolved to keep trying. Even though I will feel like an idiot. Maybe indefinitely.

It could very well be that tae kwon do turns out not to be my thing in the long term, but that won’t affect my bottom line goal which is to put myself out there, try something new, and embrace falling flat on my face (in this case, physically as well as metaphorically).

A toast to the new experiences, and New Year Idiots everywhere!