There is something about back-to-school season that still gets me, even though it has been a very long time since I needed to worry about getting myself ready for the first day of school.
Maybe it's the notebooks.
Every year, the stores fill up with notebooks, pens, pencils, folders, backpacks, and all those things that somehow made the beginning of a school year feel like a fresh start. Even if last year's math class had been a disaster or your locker had looked like something exploded inside it by October, a brand-new notebook seemed to offer another chance to get it right.
I still love looking at school supplies. I don't necessarily need them, which has never stopped me from believing that one more notebook might be completely reasonable. There's something about opening one for the first time. The pages are clean, nothing has been crossed out yet, and you haven't made any mistakes because you haven't written anything at all.
Everything is still possible.
When we're children, we're expected to spend a lot of our time not knowing things. That's basically the whole point of school. Nobody looks at a seven-year-old who doesn't understand multiplication and says, "Well, I guess you're just not a math person." We teach them. When children try something new, we expect there to be a period when they're not very good at it.
Somewhere along the way, though, I think many of us become uncomfortable with being beginners.
As adults, we're supposed to know things. We have jobs, homes, bills, families, responsibilities, and people who occasionally expect us to have answers. After enough years of being the person who is supposed to know what they're doing, it can feel surprisingly uncomfortable to say, "I have absolutely no idea how to do this."
Instead, we decide something isn't for us. We're not artistic. We're terrible with technology. We can't cook. We could never write a book. Gardening isn't our thing because the last plant we bought died three weeks later.
It becomes easier to say, "I can't do that," than to say, "I don't know how to do that yet."
Maybe we need a little more of that willingness to be beginners as adults. Not because we need to constantly improve ourselves. I think we're surrounded by enough messages telling us that already. Learn this so you can make more money. Master that so you can get ahead. Turn your hobby into a business. Become more productive.
What if we learned something for no other reason than because we're curious?
Maybe you've always wondered how to make bread from scratch. Maybe you've secretly wanted to paint, learn tarot, grow herbs, play the piano, or finally figure out what all those settings on your camera actually do.
You don't have to become good enough to sell it or post it online. You're allowed to learn something simply because one day you thought, I wonder how you do that.
Of course, that also means being willing to be bad at something for a while. The first cake might sink in the middle. You might spend an hour trying to understand something that a twelve-year-old on the internet explains in thirty seconds and wonder exactly when children became so much better at technology than the rest of us.
But eventually something starts to make sense, and one day you realize that something you once couldn't do has quietly become something you can.
Maybe that's why back-to-school season still appeals to me. Beneath all the sales and backpacks and lunch boxes, there's this feeling of beginning again. A new year. A new subject. A notebook waiting for the first word to be written on its first page.
Adults don't get many official first days. Nobody hands us a new box of pencils in September and says, "All right, here's what we're learning this year."
Maybe we can do that part ourselves. We don't need permission to learn something we've always wondered about. There doesn't have to be a class, a certificate, or even a particularly sensible reason for doing it.
Maybe that's why I still find myself drawn to those back-to-school aisles every August. It's not really about needing another notebook, but what it represents.
Blank pages don't care whether you should already know what you're doing. They don't expect whatever you put on them to be perfect, useful, profitable, or impressive. They're simply there, waiting for you to begin.
So, while the kids are heading back to school this year, maybe the rest of us could choose something we'd like to learn too. Something useful or wonderfully pointless.
I don't think we're ever really finished learning. There will always be something we don't know, something we haven't tried, or something we've quietly wondered whether we could do.
And somewhere, there will always be another blank page waiting for us to decide what we'd like to learn next.