We're at the tail end of a one-on-one, the kind that's already gone ten minutes past its calendar slot because neither of us noticed. Anya is telling me about her weekend—something about her daughter's school project, the chaos of glitter on kitchen tables—when her eyes catch the framed photo on my shelf. A judoka mid-throw, captured in that impossible moment where both bodies belong to the air.
"I used to paint", she says.
Not "I paint". Not "I'm a painter". The past tense arrives so naturally that it almost hides itself—smooth as a stone skipped across water, gone before you register the ripples. She says it the way people mention they used to live in another country: with that particular alloy of pride and distance, as if describing someone they once knew well but lost touch with.
"Why did you stop?"
She laughs. Not the real kind. The kind that covers the sound of a door closing.
"Life, I guess. Work got busy. You know how it is."
I do know how it is. That's what worries me.
I've been collecting these admissions the way some people collect restaurant recommendations they'll never follow up on. I used to play piano. I used to write poetry. I used to spend whole Saturdays building things with my hands that had no purpose other than existing. Always the same conjugation. Always that slight shift in posture, as if the body remembers something the professional self has officially archived.
The easy explanation is time. We're busy. Calendars colonize every hour. The things that don't produce outcomes get crowded out by the things that do, and painting doesn't ship features, doesn't close deals, doesn't appear on any roadmap anyone's reviewing.
But I don't think that's it. Or rather, I think time is the costume the real thing wears.
Watch what actually happens when someone stops practicing something they loved. It's rarely a dramatic farewell—no bonfire of canvases, no ceremonial smashing of instruments. It's quieter than that. A week becomes two. Two becomes a month. The guitar case migrates from the living room to the bedroom to the closet to that particular corner of the attic where we store the things we're not ready to grieve. Each migration is so small it barely registers as a choice.
But it is a choice. Just not the one we tell ourselves we're making.
Every practice shares a quality people describe in the past tense—painting, music, martial arts, writing, the slow archaeology of building something by hand. Each one demands the same thing: that you be a beginner. Not once, at the start, but perpetually. Every blank canvas is a confrontation. Every new piece of music asks your fingers to fail before they remember. The dojo floor doesn't care about your title or your tenure—it introduces itself to your back with democratic indifference.
I think about my own hands and their secret choreography with playing cards. The hours spent alone, learning to make fifty-two pieces of coated paper behave like a single living organism. The thing nobody tells you about sleight of hand is that the practice itself is an exercise in sustained inadequacy. You watch your fingers betray you hundreds of times before they learn to lie convincingly. And the moment you perform for someone—really perform, not just demonstrate—you're stepping into the possibility that the whole illusion will collapse in public.
This is what the practices have in common. They insist you be vulnerable.
And the version of us that navigates org charts, that presents quarterly roadmaps with slides so polished they could be minted, that answers "How’s it going?" with "Busy but good"—that version cannot afford vulnerability. Competence has become identity. Expertise has become armor. And somewhere in the years between who we were and who we became, we made an unconscious trade: we swapped porosity for polish.
The things that once kept us open to failure, to surprise, to the humility of not-knowing—they got filed under someday. Not because we outgrew them. Because they required a version of us that couldn't coexist with the version we were performing.
I think about this through the lens of something the Greeks might have called sophrosyne—that untranslatable quality of soundness, of occupying oneself completely. Wholeness, but not the inspirational-poster kind. The kind you feel in someone's presence, like a change in air pressure.
Here's the question: we pursue this wholeness—this sense of being fully here, fully ourselves—while systematically amputating the parts that made us whole in the first place. We optimize for a version of ourselves that is less of ourselves. We subtract and call it focus. We narrow and call it growth.
The painter who became a project manager didn't just lose a hobby. She lost the part of herself that knew how to sit with a blank surface without panicking. The musician who became a consultant didn't just stop playing—he stopped practicing the daily ritual of hearing something in his head and trying, imperfectly, to make it real. The martial artist who hung up her gi didn't just quit a sport. She quit the only place where being thrown on her back was called learning instead of failing.
Each of these practices was training something that had nothing to do with the practice itself. They were training the capacity to be unfinished. To be in progress. To exist in that space between intention and execution without rushing to close the gap or pretending it isn't there.
And that capacity—the willingness to be mid-throw, mid-brushstroke, mid-mistake—might be the thing most worth practicing of all.
I notice it in myself on the days I don't touch the cards. Not the skill erosion—that's mechanical, recoverable. What atrophies is something subtler. A willingness to be clumsy. A tolerance for the gap between what my hands can do and what my mind can see. On those days, I'm slightly more brittle in meetings, slightly quicker to reach for the pre-formed answer, slightly less patient with the productive discomfort of not knowing yet.
There's a particular kind of exhaustion that comes from being competent all the time (and operating only in your comfort zone). Not the clean tiredness of effort but the bone-deep depletion of never being allowed to fumble. Of performing fluently in every room you enter. The practice—whatever it was, whatever it is—was the one place where fumbling was the point. Where your incompetence wasn't a liability but a prerequisite. Where the gap between who you are and who you're becoming was the whole curriculum.
The practice isn't about the practice. It never was.
It's about maintaining access to the part of yourself that can sit with incompleteness without calling it failure. The part that knows how to be bad at something without it becoming an identity crisis. The part that the professional world—with its competency frameworks and performance reviews and carefully curated LinkedIn profiles—has no vocabulary for, and therefore no room.
I think about all the people I've worked with over the years who seem to carry a particular kind of tiredness that has nothing to do with workload. It sits behind their eyes like a question they stopped asking. And I wonder how many of them have something gathering dust in an attic—an instrument, a sketchbook, a pair of shoes meant for dancing—and how many of them think the tiredness would be solved by a vacation when what it actually needs is a different kind of attention entirely.
Not rest. Practice. The kind that doesn't produce anything. The kind that produces you.
Anya's one-on-one has been over for twenty minutes now. We've wandered far from sprint velocity and stakeholder alignment into territory neither of us mapped in the agenda. She's telling me about the specific blue she used to mix—cerulean and something else, she can't remember now, but her hands move as she describes it, fingers remembering a motion her mind has officially forgotten.
"My daughter asked me to paint with her last weekend," she says. "For the school project."
"And?"
A pause. That particular quality of silence that happens when someone is deciding whether to tell you the real thing or the comfortable thing.
"I almost said no. I almost said I'd help her with the research part instead." She looks at her hands. "Isn't that strange? I almost avoided the thing I used to love because—I don't know. Because I didn't want to find out I'd lost it, maybe."
Or maybe because finding it again would mean admitting she'd been gone.
I don't say that. Some truths need to arrive on their own schedule. Instead, I ask the only question that matters:
"Did you paint?"
She smiles. The real kind.
"Terribly," she says. "I painted terribly."
The afternoon light is settling into that amber register where everything looks both sharper and more forgiving. Somewhere in a closet, a guitar case is growing dust. In an attic, a sketchbook is curling at the edges. In a drawer, a deck of cards waits with the patience that only objects have—patient, like stones, holding their shape through years of being ignored.
They don't mind. They'll be there. The question is whether you will.
