On the last day of 2019, the brilliant Zing Tsjeng posted an Instagram of how she had spent the year learning to grow and cook her own vegetables. Now the caption is almost alarmingly prescient:
“WHOLESOME END OF YEAR POST: In 2019 I learnt to grow and cook my own veg 🥕🍅🌾 DM me if you want tips -it's been one of the most therapeutic and healing things I've done this year. Don't let late stage capitalism convince you that you need to wring value or profit out of all your leisure time (see: "side hustle"). Bring big hobby energy into 2020 🍠🍃”
I saved the post. I had no intention of gardening (I wish! One day…), but Big Hobby Energy hit me hard. Not having to have a tangible career benefit or even an end goal with something you love doing struck home. And doing something just because it was leisurely sounded like the biggest luxury.
I got a keyboard for my birthday and tentatively, over evenings in February and March, I sat once again next to the keys. I realised I could still read music, despite barely playing a thing since I was eighteen.
When we started having to stay home, the first thing I reached for were books. Heavy books. Books I haven’t been able to schlep along with my mobile office (read: rucksack) on the Victoria Line. Mammoth, 700 page hardbacks. I worked through them in the hours I was no longer commuting in. I realised I could still be a fast reader when I wasn’t constantly checking which tube stop I’d arrived at, or trying to turn pages whilst clinging on to 5cm of metal pole whizzing me beneath the city to my destination that day.
It’s been quite a few years since I was excited about food. Now I head to the long recipes. The marinades and the pickles and the stews. It takes five hours? See you there! It needs to rise twice? You got it!
And as you’ll know from reading this right now, I’ve been writing. And realising it’s easier when I have more than one hour to attempt to put something sensical on this website.
I haven’t cycled in years since finding it too anxiety-inducing on London’s busy streets. But now we set out a few times a week, winding through back lanes up to Alexandra Palace. My bike, which was resigned to my flat’s hallway, is now out of retirement, taking me across north London’s endless terrace houses to places I couldn’t reach on foot.
The aimless cycling reminds me of doing the same, each day, for over two years when I was a teenager in North Yorkshire. I was one of the only people I knew that couldn’t drive, and our village was basically a hamlet. I wanted to go somewhere each day, so I cycled, setting out just before dusk each evening on a ten mile-round bike trip through deserted fields and farm tracks.
This week I thought about how I have never felt good per se at cycling, but I still managed to cycle 90 miles overnight once. I am not great at kettlebells but I went up a weight this week to lifting 8kg. I wouldn’t say I am that musical compared to many of my friends, but I can still play piano with both hands and I can feel the muscle memory coming back.
Now that I read it again, Zing Tsjeng’s post reminded me of another person stepping out from unknown to familiar. Last year Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez announced that she would be tending to a community garden plot for a few months in an effort to help bring more mindfulness into her life. Something that resonated even way back in spring 2019 was that she was intent on being a total beginner. Being clueless and learning upwards. She said she was consciously doing this to also show that it’s okay to not know anything and to change that.
In the first week in self-isolation, I thought about how maybe returning to reading, piano, cycling and cooking, was a way of going back to childhood pursuits - maybe a comfort of sorts.
In the ensuing weeks I realised it was something else: these things are just me. It doesn’t need to feel juvenile or trivial. I don’t need to be that good at it, or remarkable in any way. This is just the bare bones of me.
There is so much we can’t control right now - but easing into something you once loved, or maybe starting something from scratch - there is grace there.
✶
Accounts I am loving this week in aid of trying something new or just being proud to be a beginner:
Salmon Creek (it’s a private Instagram but it’s worth it!)
Paul Fieg for Quarantine Cocktail Time