"How then do we find out what we want?"

The inner nudge that tells you *this is something I want to try*

“In a broader sense, this is a book about exploration and discovery. I have long had two favorite proverbs: one is Shaw's ‘Be sure to get what you like, or else you will have to like what you get,’ the other a translation from an old Spanish proverb, ‘Take what you want, says God, and pay for it.’ To find out what one really wants, and what it costs, and how to pay what it costs, is an important part of everyone's life work. But it is not easy to find out what we like or want, when all our lives other people have been hard at work trying not just to make us do what they want, but to make us think that we want to do it. How then do we find out what we want? What sort of clues, experiences, inner messages, may tell us? What do we do about such messages when we get them? This is in part a book about such messages.”

—John Holt, Never Too Late

It was inevitable that I would reread John Holt’s book about learning to play the cello right about now, a few weeks into my own cello adventure. It’s still very early days for me, and I’ve struggled so much with my bow hold that I really wasn’t sure until this week that I would be able to extend the rental for a second month. I haven’t yet lined up a local teacher* but I’m taking online lessons at Cello Discovery and have watched approximately eight zillion videos on bow hold. I’ve had some joint pain in my hands, especially my right pinky finger, for about a year, and the big question was/is whether taking up cello would exacerbate the problem. The jury’s still out, but I’m hopeful.

Hopeful enough to take Never Too Late off the shelf. I was in my mid-20s the first time I read it, the final volume of my obsessive dive into everything John Holt ever wrote. He was the doorway to the life I’ve been leading with my family ever since: our fabulously messy tidal homeschooling adventure. How Children Fail and How Children Learn kickstarted my exploration of joy-infused education. Growing Without Schooling magazine was my field guide. And Never Too Late, Holt’s account of his “late in life” (he was only 40, ha) start at learning to play cello was an exhilarating inspiration. 

“If I could learn to play the cello well, as I thought I could,” he wrote, “I could show by my own example that we all have greater powers than we think; that whatever we want to learn or learn to do, we probably can learn; that our lives and our possibilities are not determined and fixed by what happened to us when we were little, or by what experts say we can or cannot do.”

Back then, around the time I first read this book, I was teaching myself to weave on a used table loom I’d purchased off Craigslist. Scott was learning to play the guitar I had bought him the first Christmas after we got married. I was learning how to write novels with a baby in the sling, how to get a stroller down the subway stairs, how to grow gesneriads in an overheated New York City apartment, how to make friends with other mothers on the playground. Learning All the Time: another John Holt title, and probably the book that influenced me the most during my first five years as a parent.

Last year I took the Sparketype quiz and came up highest on Maven—the type who is made most happy and fulfilled by learning. When I saw my score, I had a beat of surprise, because I’d assumed I, a writer, embroiderer, sketchbooker, crafter, etc etc would most fit the Maker profile. That one came in a close second, but Maven, the learner, was a clear winner. And after that one moment of Oh!, I thought: Of course. Right. The thrill of chasing after knowledge is indeed my purest high.

This has meant, of course, that I’ve accumulated a lot of how-to knowledge that stays in my head and doesn’t always spill out into the world. I learned how to weave from of a book and made a set of quite beautiful cotton dishtowels and two scratchy woolen scarves, but that’s it, and that was last century. The loom, with its sturdy floor-stand and enticing levers, became a playhouse/pirate ship bedecked with Waldorfy silk scarves when my children were little. Then we moved (twice) and it spent a decade in the garage, used for weaving only by spiders. Two moves later and it’s back in my studio space but not yet fully assembled. String heddles in a bundle on the floor. Four crucial wood-screws missing. Fixable, but it hasn’t come close to climbing out of the Someday folder in my Todoist. 

And that’s just fine with me. I’m fond of my Someday list. It’s like a little cabin in the woods I can visit when I need to wander away from everyday business. It’s a library of things that light me up. A magpie nest of knowledge and ideas—things I’ve learned a lot about but am not actively busy with at the moment, but might be later. Things I’ve learned for learning’s sake. 

Thinking about this, I return to the questions John Holt asks in that quote at the top. 

“How then do we find out what we want? What sort of clues, experiences, inner messages, may tell us? What do we do about such messages when we get them?”

Do you know, for yourself? When you hear about something interesting, what’s the inner nudge that tells you: this is something I want to try? When you feel it, do you set sail immediately, previously planned voyages be damned? Do you inch into the water slowly, taking a good long while to consider a plan? Do you buy all the supplies and use them with abandon? Do you collect them and then find your interest has shifted to some other endeavor? Do you fall in love with a hobby or topic and mate for life? Or are you creatively promiscuous?