#newexperience

All of them thought that it's souvenirs or some congratulatory gift but they don't know the actual reason they were given these :3✨

Sumerja los dedos de los pies en algo nuevo este fin de semana.

Погрузитесь во что-нибудь новое в эти выходные.

這個週末讓你的腳趾接觸到新事物。

“Are you liking the work?” Martin asked, and then, as I started nodding, “yeah, I could tell— you’re physical.” We were sitting on a log in the parking lot, taking an afternoon break. I wouldn’t have described myself as particularly physically inclined a month ago— as an academic, I liked to joke that I was paid to talk. But he was right. This experience has meant excavating parts of myself that, it turns out were hiding in plain sight. Earlier in the day, I had waved Martin through an obstacle course of equipment as he moved an awkward round tank on the forklift, walking back and forth to stay in his line of sight while watching for objects on either side of his load and calling out how much space he had. I did basically the same thing this summer, waving my cousin as she backed her enormous SUV out of our narrow driveway, bringing her as close to the neighbor’s hydrangea bushes as possible without leaving any permanent damage. I keep having these moments of recognition: shoveling grape skins out of a fermenter is like shoveling snow; inoculating yeast before adding it to a barrel is like tempering eggs for a hollandaise sauce. I know how to do more things that I realized, and I’m handier than I knew. Of course, that said, I’m still hopeless— taking forever to screw on a clamp or hunting all over for the sulfur dioxide, which sits in a huge bin on the counter in the mixing room.

The stated purpose of this whole endeavor was to do something new, so the flashes of familiarity might seem like a disappointment. You can travel as far as you like; there you always are. It’s not that I haven’t been having new experiences— learning the forklift is a prime example. You may dimly remember that feeling, from childhood, of trying something new and feeling afraid, and then having some minor setback and, overwhelmed with despair, wanting to give the whole thing up. Some kindly adult may have coaxed you back, or maybe your own pluck inspired you to climb back on the two-wheeler bicycle or step back out on the diving board. A small success followed, making you feel like the emperor of the universe. And then the gradual flow of familiarity, of dexterity. I started by moving some oak barrels on racks, and picking them up from the wrong side, tipped them on end. Terror. Another intern helped me right them, making me drive the lift as we made it right. Then, yesterday, I practiced stacking the plastic bins that carry the grapes from the fields. They have a lip along the top designed to catch the feet of a bin stacked on top, so they can be stacked into towers of six that reach fifteen feet high. The trick is getting the feet to clunk into place in the little lip, so the they stick together rather than balancing, teeteringly, on top of each other. As I maneuvered the boxes around, I remembered the hours spent jockeying one of those arcade claw machines with my brother, in the vestibule of a Florida Wal-Mart, soliciting endless quarters from our grandmother in pursuit of a pink bear perched invitingly at the top of the heap of prizes. When it finally tumbled down the chute and into our grasp, it was all tatty from being raked endlessly by the metal claw.

Confrontations with radical novelty get rarer as we get older and, already good at enough things, can avoid feeling stupid or overwhelmed. I want to keep feeling stupid until I die. Carl Jung describes the many little accommodations that are made in the course of a life, which result in gradually accepting the goals and values that are presented to us:

“We wholly overlook the essential fact that the achievements which society rewards are won at the cost of a diminution of personality. Many— far too many— aspects of life which should also have been experienced lie in the lumber-room among dusty memories. Sometimes, even, they are glowing coals under grey ashes” (Modern Man in Search of a Soul, 119-120).