I was sweating through my shirt over a checklist.
Not a marathon. Not a Spartan race. A laminated checklist, taped to a control panel, with items like "mixture — rich" and "fuel selector — both." I have run a business, led a school district, preached from a pulpit, and bench pressed 335 pounds three times. And there I was, in the left seat of a Cessna 172, fumbling through a pre-flight checklist like a nervous sixteen-year-old with a learner's permit... because that's exactly what I was. A learner. Again. At an age when most people have stopped being beginners at anything on purpose.
My instructor, who is younger than my oldest son, had to correct me four times in one lesson. Four times. I felt something I hadn't felt in years: the specific, low-grade humiliation of being bad at something in front of another human being.
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's mind there are few." — Shunryu Suzuki
Why This Is Harder Than It Sounds
Here's the honest part. I didn't expect the hardest thing about learning to fly to be my ego. I expected the hardest thing to be the physics, or the FAA written exam, or remembering forty acronyms. Those are hard. But they're not the hardest thing.
The hardest thing is that I'm used to being the guy who knows things. Thirty years as an educator and administrator, a decade running an auto shop, years of pastoral ministry — I built an identity around competence. And competence, once you've had it for a few decades, starts to feel like something you're owed rather than something you built. Being a genuine beginner again cracks that open. It's uncomfortable in a way that has nothing to do with the difficulty of the material and everything to do with what it does to your sense of who you are.
Neuroscience has a name for what's actually happening in your skull when you do this, and it's better news than my ego wanted to admit. The brain retains what researchers call neuroplasticity well into old age — the capacity to form new neural pathways doesn't shut off at some arbitrary birthday. What does happen with age is that we simply stop giving our brains novel, difficult tasks that demand it. We settle into competence and stay there, and the brain, quite reasonably, stops building new roads because we've stopped asking it to travel anywhere new. Learning something genuinely difficult and unfamiliar — a language, an instrument, a cockpit — is one of the few interventions shown to meaningfully support cognitive resilience as we age. Not sudoku. Not crossword puzzles. Something hard enough to make you sweat through your shirt.
Let's Be Honest About the Resistance
I almost didn't start. I had every reasonable excuse ready: I'm too old to start something like this, it's expensive, I don't have time, what's the point at my age. Every one of those excuses was actually the same excuse wearing different clothes: I don't want to be bad at something in front of people again. I'm guessing that's true for you too, whatever your version of the cockpit is.
We build these elaborate, reasonable-sounding walls to protect ourselves from the specific vulnerability of not being good at something yet. And the older we get, the higher those walls go, because we have more competence to protect and, frankly, more years of practice building walls.
The Desert Fathers had a phrase for the posture that undoes this: they talked about becoming like a child again — not childish, but teachable, unguarded, willing to be corrected. Jesus said something similar and more direct: "Unless you change and become like little children, you will never enter the kingdom of heaven" (Matthew 18:3, NIV). I always read that as being about humility in a general sense. I don't think I understood it until an instructor half my age told me, for the fourth time in one afternoon, that I was still holding the yoke wrong.
"I am still learning." — Michelangelo, reportedly at 87 years old.
What I'm Doing With This
I'm not saying you need to learn to fly a plane. I'm also not not saying that. What I am saying is that if there isn't something in your life right now where you are a genuine, sweating, occasionally-corrected beginner, you have probably let your brain and your ego settle into a comfort that feels like wisdom but is actually just avoidance.
Pick something hard. Something you could fail at publicly. Something where a twenty-five-year-old might have to correct you. Do it not because you need another accomplishment — you don't — but because the discomfort of being new at something is doing something to your brain and your soul that comfort never will.
Takeaway: Name one thing you've avoided starting because you didn't want to be bad at it in front of someone. This week, take the first actual step — sign up, show up, make the call. Let yourself be corrected. That's the whole practice.
What would you start this week if you weren't afraid of being a beginner?