What Learning the Violin Is Teaching Me About Being a Beginner
At 39, I decided to learn to play the violin.
I grew up taking piano lessons. I took twelve years’ worth, in fact, and I’m grateful that my parents made music lessons a normal part of my childhood. I learned a little guitar in middle school, sang in choir throughout middle and high school, and became proficient enough at piano that I now teach a few children in my own little in-home piano studio.
But sometime in the past year, I realized something strange: I had fallen in love with violin music.
I would hear a violin piece and find myself unexpectedly moved to tears. There was something about the sound that seemed to reach somewhere deep in me. I’m still not entirely sure why.
Eventually, I thought, Wouldn’t it be cool if I could actually play a violin myself? And so I took the leap.
Four months in to learning the violin, I’m not exactly producing the kind of music that brings anyone to tears … unless they’re crying from secondhand embarrassment! But the experience has already taught me a few things.
1. It’s hard to be a beginner.
I don’t think I have been this noticeably bad at something in a long time. It's humbling!
Most of the things I spend my time doing are things I’ve been doing for years. I know how to homeschool my children. I know how to give sermons and lead groups.
And then I picked up a violin, and suddenly I was a beginner again.
It has given me a new kind of empathy for my piano students. I understand a little better what it feels like to sit down at an instrument and have your brain understand something that your fingers absolutely cannot yet do.
I have to remind myself: Of course you can’t do this yet. You’ve only been doing it for four months.
Kids, I think, have a natural advantage here. They’re accustomed to being beginners. Their whole lives are one long process of figuring things out. They are learning to read, learning to write, learning to tie shoes, learning math facts, learning how to interact with other people.
Adults, on the other hand, can become accustomed to competence. We like being good at things.
Being a beginner requires us to tolerate being bad at something for a while. It requires humility, patience, and the willingness to keep going when our efforts don’t yet resemble what we imagined. It’s good for me. But it’s hard.
2. Small amounts of practice really do add up.
As a homeschooling mother, I don't have an hour of uninterrupted violin practice sitting around waiting for me. I try to average about 30 minutes a day. Sometimes it’s 20. Sometimes it's less.
So I’ve had to put my faith in the unglamorous idea that small, consistent efforts eventually become significant.
I’ve read James Clear’s Atomic Habits and BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits, and I believe their basic premise: Keep showing up and your life can change.
The violin has given me a very tangible demonstration of this. A piece can look impossibly difficult when I first encounter it. But I slow it down. I isolate the hard measures. I play them badly. I play them again. I play them 20 more times. And then, one day, I can play them. Not beautifully, necessarily. But I can play them.
There are plenty of days when I don’t feel like practicing. On those days, I tell myself that I'll just play for five minutes. And almost always, five minutes turns into more.
I’ve discovered that the hardest part is often not practicing. It’s picking up the violin in the first place. There is something powerful about doing a little bit of something every day, even when the progress is so slow that you can barely see it happening.
And that’s another thing I want my children to see: learning doesn’t stop when you become an adult.
3. I want my children to see me learning, too.
I spend a lot of my time telling my children to practice… Practice your piano. Practice your memory verses. Practice your reading. Practice your math. Keep working at it. Don’t give up.
And now they get to watch me do the same thing. They get to see me struggle with something. They overhear me make mistakes. They see me practice consistently. And eventually, I hope, they will see me get better.
I also want them to see that being an adult doesn’t mean that your life becomes nothing but work and responsibility. I love being their mother. I love homeschooling them. But I also have interests that belong to me—books, friendships, dancing, and now the violin.
I want them to know that they can look forward to adulthood, too. There will always be more things to discover.
So, four months in, I am still very much a beginner. The sounds coming out of my violin are not yet worth sharing. But perhaps that's beside the point.
Maybe the most important thing isn’t that I will eventually learn to play the violin. Maybe it’s becoming the kind of person who is willing to be a beginner at 39—and who is willing to keep showing up, one small practice session at a time.
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