Every Sunday after Mass, we host a brunch for family members who are able to join. This routine has been a tradition for many years and has evolved from the days with just our children to include grandchildren, siblings, and friends from time to time. Our place of choice includes our trusted friend, Travis, who knows what we want before we sit down, self-serve coffee, and placemats and crayons for the kids. The paper placemats have a menus and activities on the front and are blank on the back.

Every week, each of my grandchildren asks me to draw a picture on the back of their placemat. Alas, I am no artist, but I do have some standard things I sketch out that somewhat resemble the intended subject. Walking past our table on a Sunday morning, one might see rough drawings of World War II bombers, fighter jets, submarines, rockets, battleships, castles, hot air balloons, barns, tractors, cars, trees, flowers, or mountain fortresses drawn with a view of the activities within. These sketches are suspended in time as reflections of my10 or 11 year old self and those moments of interest…and artistic development.

Occasionally, I’ll be asked to draw a dragon or a cat or some other creature, at which point my rudimentary skills fall-off precipitously and I’m relegated to stick figures and cartoonish looking characters that even my supportive grandchildren find less than inspiring. When I am asked, I go to the things I know and can draw quickly. When I attempt the things I don’t know, or haven’t tried before, the process slows down dramatically and I realize how much time, effort, and focus it takes in the unknown. That process can be frustratingly uncomfortable.

Watching my son-in-law working with the kids on throwing and catching the baseball the other day, I heard him say “two hands while learning” as he taught them to trap the ball in the mitt with their free hand. I also noticed the phrase appearing while they were shooting and passing the basketball. The words have been echoing in my mind as I’ve reflected on change and the radical discomfort that comes whenever we move into the unknown places that demand new things of us.

For all of us, the ability to stick with something through the discomfort of learning it determines whether or not we move to a greater state of mastery. Kids often get impatient with this zone of incompetence because it can be maddeningly slow and what they really want is the joy that comes with mastery. But children also have the gift of curiosity, single-mindedness, and time, that helps them push through the mundane to high degrees of mastery. When they become captivated by something, they can move into the repetitive cycle of “do it again” that gets them past the discomfort of incompetence.

As we get older, this becomes more and more difficult. We tend to avoid things that demand us to endure the extended discomfort of incompetence and the single-minded focus required to move past it. We want to go to the castles, planes, and hot air balloons that we already know how to draw.

This is why change can be so difficult. Change demands something. It’s going to cost us comfort, clarity, and maybe even our pride. In his book, From Strength to Strength, Arthur Brooks argues that we start to decline in our physical and intellectual capacities pretty much as soon as we hit adulthood and then offers some strategies for navigating the inevitable to find joy along the way. I think one thing he misses in this journey is our inclination to avoid things that will help us grow because of the discomfort that comes when we step into the unknown places where we have no mastery.

Yesterday, I smiled as I watched my four-year-old grandson ride his tricycle with no hands. Two hands while learning, indeed! The creative effervescence that is youth and the fearlessness of leaping before you look is a super-power that experience can extinguish. But all of which we are now capable was once unknown and the faltering steps we took to learn it was uncomfortable. We may have lost some pliability along the way, but there are plenty of possibilities to learn to draw new shapes, catch new balls, or ride new bikes, before us.

We just have to be willing to slow down and keep walking through the frustrating and sometimes scary unease of using two hands while learning.