Doorknobs & Gumbo

The doorknob on our garage door broke. For some unknown reason, it froze with the doohickey extended so that it wouldn’t close. No problem,  I knew that I could fix it. So I grabbed my tools and got busy disassembling the door knob.

It started out simple enough, but then after I got into the guts of it, it started to get frustrating. I couldn’t get the spindle thingy to come out so that I could remove the extender doohickey. It was seemingly impossible. I tried force. I tried gentleness. I tried leverage. I tried using substitute swear words. Nothing worked. And it was hot in the garage and I was getting sweaty.

After about 30 minutes of pulling and prodding, I gave up. I needed to turn to a higher power: YouTube.

I did a quick search for removing a broken Schlage doorknob, and viola! There was a video just for that. It turns out that there was this little thingamajig in the thingamabob that needed to be flipped before you could remove it from the doohickey.

I watched the video a couple of times and, armed with the light from my iPhone and a trusty screwdriver, I flipped the thingamabob on the thingamajig and pulled the thingy from the doohickey. Worked like a charm. Thank heavens for YouTube!

You can learn how to do a lot of new stuff on YouTube.

Today’s question: What is the last new thing you learned how to do?

As I am getting older, I find that I amass TONS of information, (current affairs, politics, gospel, pop culture) but I rarely learn any new skills. Professionally, I have been doing pretty much the same thing for decades, so I don’t learn a lot of new things. Some professionals, like nurses, CPAs, teachers are required to go to attend regular training to maintain certifications, so they keep learning – some info, some skills. Some church responsibilities teach us new skills, such as Scouting or Family History, but some don’t make many demands of us in the new skills department.

When we are younger adults there is so much we need to learn just to find our place in the world. We learned how to write essays, we learned how to change diapers, we learned how to make things grow, we learn how to navigate our professional worlds.  All of these endeavors required a non-stop acquisition of new skills.

Sitting here at 54 years of age, I find myself “coasting” now and again. Do you ever feel that? It seems that we get to a point of competency where we can move through life, and learning new skills isn’t really required of us. We can be so comfortable that we can spend our time getting by with the same weaponry in our individual arsenals, and do just fine. To make it even more comfortable, we can spend a lot of our effort acquiring new information from a zillion sources, so we are technically learning new things, but we don’t learn how to do new things.

Part of the problem is that the older we get, the harder it can be to learn new skills. (You know it’s true.) However, doing just that can make our later years richer and healthier. (For example, learning a new language can slow the aging of the brain and help prevent Alzheimer’s – Learning how to play a musical instrument might help prevent dementia.) They say that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. It isn’t true.  More on point is that you can’t make an old dog want to learn new tricks.

As adults, we are busy, and frankly, we get tired. The idea of making an effort to learn new skills isn’t all that appealing. Most of the time it is born out of necessity (doorknob). But sometimes, when we extend ourselves, we can learn to do new things that can prove useful and satisfying.

To help illustrate my point, I have had a few opportunities to learn how to do new stuff – and I liked it.

A few months ago, I decided to ante up and go back to school. Granted, it was short, but it was a “school,” and I learned something new. More specifically, I attended “The New Orleans School of Cooking” and learned how to make some awesome cajun food.

It was fun to learn how to do new stuff.  And it was tasty.

More recently, I learned how to create a book. From formatting, to designing the cover, I learned how to do the whole thing up to uploading it to the printer. The great reception to the book has been gratifying, but learning how to create that book was also very satisfying.

And most recently, I attended the LDS Storymakers Conference in Provo this past weekend to learn how to be a better writer. And I was not alone. There were over 750 kindred spirits there, all with the same goal of learning how to do something new, or do something better. It was fascinating, educational, and – dare I say – inspirational. There was a special energy there that comes from a large group of people with the same goal of self-improvement and acquisition of new skills.

I will admit that it has been a looooong time since I sat in a classroom setting for hours upon hours. I will also admit that my brain got tired trying to soak it all in- which reinforces my point that we can get lazy in learning. But I did learn. And it felt good.

One reason I look back fondly to my college days and my early days in business and parenting is that there was so much to learn how to do. That growth is exciting, and I got a taste of that this past weekend at Storymakers. I also got a taste of it courtesy of a broken doorknob and YouTube. (I preferred Storymakers.)

There is so much to learn, and so much to learn to do.

(And yes, I can make Loisianna shrimp and grits like a pro.)