I know of few things more enjoyable than a beginner’s learning curve: steep, almost vertical violence, and seemingly endless. However, the immense pleasure of initiation seems forbidden for adults, as if everything that we did not learn as children implied a resignation for life. I recently accompanied my partner to a neighborhood judo gym. The teacher, when he found out that he had no experience, did not take a second to dissuade him: here, the least, has been doing judo for twenty years, he told him; Champions of Spain train in this room, he said; I couldn’t pay attention to you, he said; only children start from scratch, he told her. He just wanted to feel again the genuine giddiness of taking off a white belt and putting on a yellow one, but those kinds of humble desires are frowned upon in the poor old world.
I refuse to think that adults can no longer be, as Bowie used to say, absolute beginners. “There could hardly be anything, / nothing we can’t deal with. / We are absolute beginners / without much to lose. I don’t want to give up the few things that I still do for the pleasure of doing them, those that are not tainted by the craft and that are not even mediated by a goal. Doing something, whatever it is, knowing that doing your best is not the same as doing it right: this is one of the few ways left to us, when we grow up, to make mistakes without fear, to ask silly questions without being judged, and to conserve our ability to look at the world with the fresh eyes of someone who does not have to know everything. It is in the beginning where we can still, by continuing with Bowie, be heroes. Even if it’s for a day.
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