I’ve had the privilege of getting really, really good at two things in my life: developing electronics, and playing bluegrass music. Both have reaped significant personal and monetary rewards for me. (Significantly less of the monetary variety has come from bluegrass, but that’s a topic for another day.) The skill at both of those things has come with a cost, though. It’s kind of hard for me to “just be chill” about those areas now. In the electronics domain, the joy of simple creation is mostly gone. There were days where wiring up a breadboard circuit, or hooking up an Arduino to some sensor, would have been a really fun thing to do. Those days are more or less gone for me. I have done enough work in the field, and seen enough approaches to problems, to have a reasonably good idea when an idea is possible or not. I also have a decent idea of how to implement those possibilities, or where to look if I don’t. (Thank god for semiconductor application notes.) I’m happy to do that kind of stuff when there’s a goal in sight - typically, a business objective. It’s the simple tinkering, for its own sake, that’s lost its shine. In bluegrass, it’s become a greater selectivity about who I make music with. This seems to be pretty common among folks who get to an advanced level on an instrument. The polite ones will tell you this if you ask directly. (The less polite ones will tell you without you asking.) You just get a bit pickier about who you pick with when you get better. It’s certainly not malicious, even if it is a bit elitist. The best comparison I can draw was from attending a Baha’i wedding. A group of older relatives sat apart from the rest of the reception, chatting spiritedly in Persian. At one point I asked one of them what they were talking about. He said “Oh, nothing, really. It’s just nice to speak freely in our own language again.” Music is the same way. In music, like discussion, you can have a lot more interesting conversations with people who know the language better. The net result, though, is this higher bar for what’s fun. As your experience level grows, you need higher highs to get the same thrill from a lower level. Which, in turn, is why it’s so fun to be a novice again. I’ve been lucky enough to find two areas where I can spark this joy again: rec hockey, and learning guitar. I played pond hockey in college - mostly out of convenience. I lived across the street from a park that the city would flood in winter for a skating rink. Pickup hockey games would naturally arise. It was great fun, and great exercise. I chose to get back into this, fifteen years later, after my doctor told me that a number of important health metrics were going the wrong way for me. And you know what? I’m terrible at it. I can just barely skate backwards. I’m slow enough that anyone with any speed can blow past me on offense or defense. I have shifts where I fall on my face three or more times. But it doesn’t matter - because it’s fun! I’m fortunate to have found a league with plenty of people in the same spot as me: adult novices just doing something they like, for the hell of it. It doesn’t really matter to anyone how good or bad we are. In the musical domain, I’ve started to get serious about learning bluegrass guitar. I’ve been pretty exclusively focused on the dobro for 20ish years, and, frankly, I’m very good at it. It’s kind of hard to find a pick that pushes me to the limits of that skillset. The answer, then, is to shift the bar, and learn something new. And that’s been just what I needed. Jams that bored me on to dobro are engaging again playing guitar. It’s good for the ego, too, to remind yourself of what it’s like to stumble your way through something again.

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