Ask Alex: Am I too old to learn?

“I’m almost 47 and learning to play music. It does not come naturally to me. I once hummed what I thought was 'Black Dog' but my husband sys sounded like the Munster’s theme song. I feel silly. Will it eventually make sense?”

— Anonymous

I really love this question. It applies not just to learning music, but to learning all sorts of things after forty and maybe even after some point in your thirties. I can’t remember when, exactly, the elasticity began to harden a bit. 

The following, I hope, can apply to learning after a particular age.

When we're younger, we build mechanisms and systems within ourselves that we can later apply reflexively. We build a system around music theory and/or applied practice and we nurture that system along the way and then we can activate and apply it somewhat seamlessly. When we try to do the same as adults it can feel as though the mechanisms never quite become a seamless part of us. The application feels clunkier than it would have if we’d done all this when we were younger. If you are young and putting off learning a thing, please allow me to encourage you to not put it off for very long if you can avoid it.  

I relate to the musical example especially. A number of remarkable people in my life are musicians, and it's been an aspiration of mine for a long time. It felt pretty far off when I was an undiagnosed, untreated ADHD kid, and it went by the wayside for years. I didn't start learning to play or even the basics of music theory until my late thirties. Even now, I'm learning clunkily and irregularly, often feeling exactly what you're describing, often hoping things will get better. 

A lot of this comes down to the conditions of learning something new. Not like "I already play guitar and now I'm picking up violin," but starting with little foundation. If you're like me, you may have even been told by a music teacher early on that you were unteachable, or you carry some other kind of baggage around learning this stuff. Taking on a whole new way your brain has to work, whether that's music or math or any new discipline, can feel impossibly daunting! You are not alone in this feeling. 

And of course, being older means it can feel like there's less time to devote to new endeavors. Plenty of our musically gifted friends had parents who gave them no choice but to study. They learned fundamentals, and learned how to collaborate, under conditions far better suited to learning than the ones we're in when we decide as adults to pick something up. Between the hardening of the aforementioned elasticity and the circumstances working against fluid learning, it can feel clunky, and it can feel like it will never improve.

There are ways to show up for the practice, to bring the curiosity and tenacity you need to actually get better. But I want to assure you: it's fine if you never fully get there. And I think you will. But if you're like me, you'll be tempted to lament not having done this years earlier, to mourn not mastering it while your elasticity was still there. It's easy to ask, “What's even the point if I can't get as good as I would have back then?" I hear that voice too whenever the rhythm isn't coming smoothly. You may not have that voice but I do. But I can set it aside, because I believe the act of trying to learn something new, of setting new pathways, especially toward the arts, is itself valuable. If it is any consolation, every single thing I do out of passion for making shit is something I started doing “way too late” in one way or another. 

Art is a way of connecting with people and with our shared experience and series of wavelengths that are universal. For a lot of us without a specific religious identity or practice, it's the closest thing we have to a spiritual practice. (For many WITH religious identity and practice it serves a similar function.) Trying to connect with that regardless of how late we are to the game is a radical act and an important one, especially when it comes to the humanities and the arts. For that reason alone, it's worth continuing to show up, even if all you get between now and the end of your life is five percent better than you are today. Though I'm certain you'll get so much further than that.

The other piece of advice that's helped me: be flexible and gracious with yourself. You won't always have the time, and you won't always be in the headspace for lessons or theory or fundamentals. Show up anyway, in whatever way you can, for the time you've set aside. I think we often push ourselves toward burnout trying to force our brains into a mode they're not ready for. Make the space, and push yourself to learn outside your comfort zone when you can. But when your brain won't let you do that, show up for something, anything, connected to that space instead. On days when the lesson is not coming naturally, or is coming with some level of difficult to navigate resistance, I’ll do some other related thing that keeps my brain, stimulated and expanding in that arena. 

And if you can, show up with other people. I don't know many musicians, great, good, or just enthusiastic, who don't maintain their skill through exchange and practice with others. It's like learning a language. To speak it, you need people to speak it with. If you can take lessons, whether in practice or theory, that give you a place to exercise what you're learning in real time, I'd encourage it. Learn with other people. There's plenty you can teach yourself alone, plenty of places to pick up skills and insight on your own. But it's in the doing, both alone and with others, that you internalize not just the theory, but the lived practice and the culture of what you're trying to learn.

One other thing, with regard to your husband's response: this is something I've learned from living with professional musicians and being around artists. Despite my advice to learn and play music with other people, sometimes we need to work through the learning parts of these endeavors by ourselves, or in safe spaces where we're not necessarily heard, particularly by the people who see us most familially, most intimately.

There's something about being experienced while we're learning, by the people we love in that way, that can feel limiting. It can be especially triggering for our inner critics. I think it's worth figuring out what you're okay with when it comes to your household experiencing your learning process, and how much commentary you want from them, and then just naming it. Something like: I'm learning this right now, it's a process, there are parts of it I feel vulnerable about, here's what I'm fine with you hearing, and here's where I'd rather not get your opinion.

You might even structure your practice space so you don't have to worry about being heard by anyone who isn't your musical comrade in arms (and strings and voice and synths, maybe, I don’t know).

All of this is to say this venture is not silly. It is important. Growth and curiosity are beautiful even when the elasticity has hardened a little bit.

You got this. Thanks for your great question. 

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