The Last Word On Nothing

When I was sixteen, my voice teacher predicted I would become a Jack of all trades. It wasn’t a compliment: We were in the midst of a fight, squaring off across the shiny black battlefield of her baby grand piano. She wanted me to concentrate only on singing. But I couldn’t imagine abandoning subjects like math, from which I derived a kind of type-2 satisfaction, or quitting ski racing—the locus of my teenage social life.

That latitude—that lack of focus—would be my downfall, she warned. And her prophecy seemed to come true as I grew up and flitted from hobby to hobby, career to career.

In college, I fell in love with philosophy, then geology. After graduation, I moved to a mountain town where I spent winters in ski boots and summers sweating under a backpack or dangling from a climbing rope. In graduate school, I dedicated much of my free time to trail running and even completed an ultra-marathon. For a while, I became obsessed with trying to bake perfectly round baguettes with perfectly scored “ears.” I grew and canned food like the apocalypse was nigh. And for several years, I fronted a raucous country band.

On the outside, it looked like I had a long list of skills and accomplishments. But to me, this all felt like mounting evidence of my promiscuous mind and weak willpower. I was hardly exceptional at any of these pursuits, and I hopscotched between them like a distracted child. I wasn’t serious; I was just “going through a phase.”

The final proof came at the end of my PhD, when I decided to leave academia and become—of all things—a journalist. I chose the profession in part because it seemed like a good fit for my roving curiosity, pent up after years of specialized research. But for that very reason, the jump certified my flakiness.

Single-mindedness is often celebrated, and for good reason. Many extraordinary people have accomplished great things through dogged dedication (see: Mozart, Serena Williams, and Katalin Karikó—who pioneered mRNA vaccines). Yet as I aged, I found it hard to stick to one path. And there was another downside to my dabbling: I felt ashamed whenever I let something go. Like in grad school, when my husband and I backpacked less and stopped climbing altogether. Or when we took a few years off of music after our band broke up. And of course, when I walked away from science. Each change felt like a failure.

But eventually, I started to wonder whether that was fair—or healthy. I saw how clinging to old versions of myself could transform prized memories into painful wounds, like family heirlooms suddenly revealed to be stolen. It could revise the narrative of a richly lived life, lacing it with bitterness and nostalgia.

At the same time, I began to understand that my phases weren’t fickle and flighty. They often had a purpose. In grad school, running gave me a way to move forward when I got stuck in the lab or mired in messy computer code. A few years ago, while grieving a series of miscarriages and the sudden death of a beloved dog, I took comfort in print-making. I spent evenings gouging patterns into squares of linoleum with tiny blades, carving out the contours of my sorrow and letting my body convalesce. (Every phase, I have learned, mercifully ends.).

Phases also have an appealing economy: In a short period of intense focus, you can gain proficiency that lasts long after you’ve moved on. I can still bake a decent loaf of bread. And I will never forget how to ski powder (knees willing). Phases and life-long passions aren’t necessarily incompatible, either. I have always been a writer—of childhood stories, songs, scientific papers, and now, journalism. And despite my teacher’s warning, I’ve never stopped singing. I just shifted from opera to bluegrass to rock and roll, discovering different sides of my instrument in the process.

And really, what separates the lowly Jack of all trades from the celebrated Renaissance man (or woman)? Many great minds have been wide-ranging and versatile (see: Aristotle, George Washington Carver, Hedy Lamarr). In fact, as I learned while reporting a story on the benefits of hobbies, cross-pollination can boost creativity, cognitive flexibility and problem solving. One psychologist I interviewed said that diverse interests are a common ingredient in what we call genius.

To me, though, the greatest gift of phases is that they free us from the confines of our past, offering instead the opportunity to become collectors of our own lives.

Right now, I’m collecting a particularly precious phase: most afternoons, my toddler and I stroll down the block and stop to watch bees mob a flowering rosemary bush. We play guitar and his eyes thrill as he strums the strings. We lay in the grass and survey the sky for the faint orb of the moon—his first and favorite word.

I’ve had to let some things go since my son arrived. A friend recently asked what I was growing in my garden, and I couldn’t help but sigh, remembering how I once would have showed her surfeits of lettuce, neat rows of radishes, beets, and scallions. This year, lanky volunteers and unruly weeds crowd my raised beds, towering over the chard starts and peas that I hastily squeezed in between. (In the time it’s taken me to finish this essay, I’ve let three tomato plants languish to near death in their pots.)

I admitted as much to my friend and told her that I’m learning to give myself permission to let things like gardening slip, at least for now. I don’t want to spend my time with my son berating myself for the things I’m not doing. After all, there’s always next year—and the next phase.

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Julia Rosen is an independent journalist covering science and the environment from Portland, Oregon.

Image via Flickr user Spirit-Fire under Creative Commons license.