He’d given her permission to be bad at things.
Not in words — he’d never framed it so directly, would probably have found the framing slightly patronizing if she’d put it that way. But in practice, in the accumulated evidence of years, he’d made it clear by his own example: that you were allowed to try things poorly, to be a beginner indefinitely, to pursue something for the pleasure of it with no requirement of competence.
He played guitar badly and without apology. Had for as long as she’d known him, would for as long as she knew him, made no particular effort to improve because the improvement wasn’t the point.
She’d watched this and thought, initially: how strange. How peaceful. How completely unlike the way she’d lived, which was to either do things well or not begin them at all.
She’d started painting the second year. Watercolors, small ones, uniformly terrible in a way she found she didn’t mind because he had established, entirely by accident, that minding was optional.
“You’ve gotten better,” he said now, looking at the latest one. She knew he meant it kindly.
“I genuinely haven’t,” Suki said. “Look at this tree.”
“It has character.”
“It has the shape of a person in distress.”
“Trees in distress have character.” He hung it on the wall beside the others, completely serious. “That’s where it lives now.”
She looked at her small terrible gallery and felt the specific satisfaction of someone who has given themselves permission, through someone else’s example, to be human in the most ordinary way — imperfect, attempting, entirely unjustified in their happiness about it.
✦ Today’s Reflection
Is there something you’ve always wanted to try but held back from because you were afraid of being bad at it? What would it take to begin anyway?
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