Learning by Heart By Laura J. Oliver

Today I’m tackling that thankless girl-job of swapping out sundresses and sandals for sweaters and boots. This change of seasons is an opportunity to cull all the clothes that don’t… you know… “spark joy.” All the pants I haven’t worn in the last five years and the midriff-exposing crop-tops that I pilfered from both my daughters’ toss-it-out bags before I actually tossed any of it out. I’ve been saving so many things that would benefit someone else more.

In the midst of reorganizing, I unearthed a curiosity: my mother’s first diary.  It starts, “I am Virginia Aten. I am 14 and we are living on Mary Clepper’s farm. Uncle Stanley stopped by and said he saw my violin Sunday down at Florence’s. She is coming to visit, and I can hardly wait to take lessons!”

Across a century I recognized this passion for knowledge and realized it is the most valuable thing my mother passed on to me.

Learning sparks joy.

I felt about the piano as my mother did about the violin when I started lessons at six, and I got to thinking about all the lessons I’ve had to date and to wondering about yours–about the odd bits of knowledge we carry from each.

In piano lessons, I learned that you can’t substitute reading music with playing by ear for very long unless you are my high school friend Eddie Parker, who became the keyboard player in a very successful band without learning to read a note. But Eddie was super cute and very tall, and I think that helps. I also learned that you do eventually have to learn the fingering, which I’m guessing Eddie didn’t do either. See the aforementioned “very tall” and “super cute.” Add “super talented.”

In ballet, I learned that I started too late.

In high school, I was cast in a musical role written for a soprano when I was a natural alto. This led to a few voice lessons where I learned that to hit a note beyond your range while under the footlights, you cut off the consonant and leave the word open on a vowel sound. The audience can’t tell the difference. They hear what they expect to hear! So, you sing, “I’ve never been in la—- before,” and they hear, “I’ve never been in love before,” and only you and Sky Masterson know you just sang something really stupid.

In pickleball, I learned to play nicely with strangers who were friends with each other. It made me feel both mature and lonely.

Taking Lindy Hop lessons, I learned I love to dance even with strangers who are friends with each other. I didn’t feel lonely because music, like humor, is connecting. I also learned how remarkable it is to let someone else lead. To be told with a touch, a slight pressure at your wrist or waist which way to go.

At ice skating lessons, I learned that if you’re going to fall, for god’s sake, fall! Don’t teeter and totter and stagger around, trying NOT to fall. Surrender to the inevitable with grace.

At the SPCA volunteer training class I learned how to safely walk a dog that has just been taken from the only home he’s known and dumped in a steel mesh and concrete run. Stay fifty feet away from every other dog on the trail, and if your dog bolts off the bridge you’re going in the creek after it. I learned I love dogs. I also learned that I am not the alpha—you are. The same held true in parenting classes. I am not the alpha. (They are.) I also learned that to manipulate a child, you give him two choices, both of which are what you want. Do you want to go to bed now, or in 5 minutes? It’s amazing that they don’t get on to this.

In Lamaze classes, I learned that a French obstetrician named Fernand Lamaze thought up a really funny trick. Tell a woman birthing a bowling ball to think about something else, and it won’t hurt.

He got this swell idea in the Soviet Union and brought it back to the women of France, where it caught on across Europe and the States. Lamaze graded the women’s performance in childbirth from “excellent” to “complete failure” on the basis of their “restlessness and screams.” The failures he believed had harbored doubts about the power of distraction or had not practiced enough. “Intellectual” women who “asked too many questions” were the most certain to fail.

He was not nearly as empathetic as my sister, who, when I was expecting my first child, explained his technique like this. Remember when we were little, and we ran around the yard at dusk playing hide and seek all sweaty and covered in mosquito bites, and you’d fall down and gash your knee open and not even feel it until you finally came in to take a bath because you were so caught up in the game?

 It’s like that.

In Suzanne Giesemann’s classes on developing intuition, we practiced reading each other in a group on Zoom. I learned I am a nascent psychic or an incredibly lucky guesser. And I know what you’re thinking, which answers that question. See?

I’m still trying to figure out why we are here—why did spirit become matter? A lot of people say we’re here to learn, to grow. I still prefer the word “experience” to “learn,” but it’s my experience that learning sparks irrepressible joy.

You learn to make music, fall with grace, let someone else lead, breathe through pain, and negotiate. You don’t close off the consonants but leave love open-ended—because you have learned one of life’s most important lessons.

We hear what we expect to hear, see what we expect to see, and if we give away what we have been saving, we might find what we are looking for.

Laura J. Oliver is an award-winning developmental book editor and writing coach, who has taught writing at the University of Maryland and St. John’s College. She is the author of The Story Within (Penguin Random House). Co-creator of The Writing Intensive at St. John’s College, she is the recipient of a Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in Fiction, an Anne Arundel County Arts Council Literary Arts Award winner, a two-time Glimmer Train Short Fiction finalist, and her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her website can be found here.