Every day, we face opportunities to bloom and grow, as well as lots of ways to stagnate and get stuck. It takes some work on our part to recognize how many choices we make every day — deliberate and unconscious — that really steer our lives along one path or the other. I have been thinking a lot about this since I retired a few years ago. 

When you are pursuing a career, the last thing you want to do is to undermine your pose as a serious competent person, someone who knows the rules and follows them. But since leaving that position as a sociology professor, I’ve embraced new adventures that take me way away from my comfort zones. I have embraced the blessing of the being the dumbest person in the room.  We all have a long list of reasons why we don’t take up new adventures and opportunities. “ I will stink at this. What if I embarrass myself? Everyone will be better than me.  I should have started in my teens. And on and on. I have countered those arguments with my own list of counterarguments. Imagine learning how to read music!  Wouldn’t it be fun to put your wicked sense of humor to good use? This opens up new worlds to you.

If we want to grow, we may need to change our self-definition from a person who can’t to one who can and will.

Following these bold declarations, have taken up a series of projects that I really had no business doing, according to those self-defeating criteria of being too busy, too old, too shy, too me. In fact, a key here is to define yourself as a new kind of person, a person who tap dances, or sings in a choir, or plays drums or leads walks, or teaches yoga and whatever that may be. 

So, I started a new business that’s been a wonderful gift with some big fails. I took improv classes and been on the stage with a talented group of actors. I enrolled in a poetry class, my very first foray into writing poetry and sharing it with others. I joined a community band where I was not only assigned instruments, I’d never played but just had my debut as a mallet percussionist (Glockenspiel and timpani) in costume. In the photo, I am dressed like a sloth because I really am not only the slowest person in the orchestra but also the least experienced, having never in a band before and very new to reading music.   In every one of instances, people have been kind and welcoming; I have made new friends; I have learned new skills that I thought were out of reach and have a new sense of possibility and joy. This all in the context of a challenging personal year with the deaths of several people I was close to. 

Combined with the hard-won wisdom of being an older person, embracing being the dumbest person in the room has left me with more room for learning, growing and fun and less space for self-criticism, embarrassment, and regret for not doing things I have dreamt of doing.