Recently, I was talking with a friend, sharing my struggles with my new role as a full time artist and fledgling business owner, and she reminded me that when we first met, I was a struggling new teacher. Thinking back to that time, I daily asked myself if I had made a mistake entering this career path. It took about three years before I felt more confident at my job and began slipping through the night. I had moved from being a novice to a proficient educator. In time with the support of my family, friends, colleagues, parents, administrators, and even students, I became an advanced educator taking on the challenges of chairing my department, mentoring student and new teachers, sitting on committees that helped to mold policy. Yet, having achieved all of these things, I felt that there was something missing in my life. When I took the time to explore the issue, it turned out to be the need to utilize my creative talents. Along with many other factors, I was faced with a decision to make, stay put and put my physical and mental wellbeing on the line or jumped into the unknown. As someone who’s played it safe most of her life, I knew that it was finally time to take the risk and start over.

Now I am back to being a novice, as I learn to build my business, use social media to promote myself, and over come creative slumps. Then again, throughout our lives we are constantly finding ourselves in the position of being a novice. We were once novices at walking, talking, writing with a pencil, riding a bike, reading a book, and the list goes on. We moved on to be proficient at those tasks, and some of us chose to move onto advanced levels by practicing long hours, whether it be on an instrument, the playing field, or the page of a sketchbook.

Another necessity to move from novice towards proficiency is kindness. The kindness from people like our parents, teachers, friends, or mentors who patiently help and encourage us along the way. You know who we most need kindness from on this journey? Ourselves! Yes, I’m talking about our inner voices the ones that either encourage us to pick ourselves up when we fall, or tells us we are such a failure, and we should just quit. Take a moment to reflect on your life, I bet you can spot those times when you made the critical choice to either continue with the path you were on, or to give up. When you kept going you eventually left the novice stage. As the more skillful you became, you reached the next decision: do I keep going or does my true passion lie somewhere else.

Life is full of new opportunities to be a novice. Depending on where you are in life you might be finding that you are falling in love and wanting to build a long term relationship with someone. Maybe you are in the process of becoming a parent, which sometimes feels like you will never leave the novice stage. New job, moving to a new community, taking a course, retiring, all of these events in life see us entering them as a novice. You’re going to be unsteady and unsure of yourself. You will have a steep learning curve to achieve. You will make mistakes and fall down. You will get up and recover, and learn how to keep going. That is the challenge and the joy of living. Remember you may be a novice right now, but you won’t be in this spot for very long. You will grow, put down roots to support yourself, you will branch out, and finally blossom. The lesson here is that it is never too late to start something new. And most importantly - never give up the hope that trying something new may bring joy into your life.