#56: Maybe it’s time to let some of these youthful desires expire.
Let me queue you in on a little secret of mine: for the past three years, I’ve been on the precipice of taking an art class, specifically something in intermediate sketching. I have this idea of writing and illustrating my own graphic novel. The idea even led me to enroll in a “drawing and sketching” class offered in my town’s continuing education program, but the lack of interest caused its cancellation. I really do enjoy drawing, but it’s not a skill that I’ve ever spent much time developing. As a kid, I doodled in sketch books, but over time, my own sketches never filled the entirety of those books.
Getting better at drawing was something I always assumed “Future Chris” would tackle. He would be the professional and up to task of illustrating that graphic novel. Now that I’m in the tractor-beam of forty, it’s “do or die” time.
Drawing isn’t the only skill I aspire to develop.
Like most with a pulse, my wife and I recently finished the fifth season of Netflix’s Cobra Kai, a continuation of the Karate Kid franchise. The show is completely over the top in literally every way imaginable, but it’s self-aware and completely leans into its own absurdity. We, like so many others, unconditionally love it.
Reader, it’s at this point you’d might expect me to go into the show’s story aspects and merit and connect it to that little anecdote at the beginning. That something happened this season that made me want to take a pen to the blank page and improve on my drawing ability. While that would be nice, in the case of this particular post, you’d be dead wrong. Besides, there’s not much to the story nor the character arcs that’s revolutionary or inspiring.
You see, Cobra Kai doesn’t make me yearn to create like other stories do; it makes me want to kick ass.
At the end of each season of Cobra Kai, a little habit developed: I declare that I would finally learn a martial art. Then, I research the best places in the neighborhood, plan to go, and then never do. Learning a martial art is something I always wanted to do. This desire, originally born out of a love for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and facilitated by corny Jackie Chan movies, is kindled once more by the Karate Kid continuation.
Like drawing, martial arts is something I expected “Future Chris” to conquer.
At the conclusion of this past season, I started doing some research again and even asked around for advice on different dojos. However, as time increased between the final episode and my day-to-day life, my martial arts motivation began to wane.
Wait.
I think I did just connect my experience with the show to my artistic anecdote at the top. (I swear I didn’t intend on doing that.)
Reader, as a kid, I’d see things and want to make them a part of who I was. I’d see a kung fu movie and thought it was cool, so I wanted to learn to fight. I’d watch a great movie, so I thought being a filmmaker was my path. Read a great comic strip? Cartoonist was a potential job prospect!
So on, and so on, and so on.
Reader, I always figured I had all the time in the world to learn everything I always wanted to do. While I’m nowhere near the end of my life, certain responsibilities have filled up my card and makes learning a new skill require a passion behind it. I’m starting to see that if I haven’t made a move to learn any of these things in the last twenty years, maybe they aren’t skills I really care to develop.
Maybe it’s time to let some of these youthful desires expire.
I’m not going to be a professional illustrator nor a karate master. To do that would require an allotment of time and years of dedication. That’s something I simply do not have the desire to do. So, I won’t be enrolling in that art class next time it comes around, nor conduct dojo inquiries after season six of Cobra Kai. This is okay.
It’s okay to let them go.
There are, though, other skills and desires I do value. Those that I spend my time developing. You just finished reading one of them.
As always, thanks for doing that.