My Guy loves basketball. He accuses me of exaggeration, but during March Madness I had to nudge (nag?) him away from the TV more than once to get him out the door for errands or into the kitchen for dinner. He can be transfixed by the jazzy squeak of sneakers and the aggressive-yet-fluid moves of the players.

What does that have to do with journalism or writing or anything these posts claim to be about?

Maybe a lot, according to a recent piece in The New York Times. So if you’re a young – or not-so-young – journalist/writer impatient with your progress, or frustrated with your career status, or just wondering how I’m going to connect these dots, hang in.

The piece I reference ran in Your Money, written by Abby Ellin, who writes about retirement.  On the surface it was about people who discover latent creative talents in their post-retirement years. As I have somehow reached what the French so gently call un certain age, it piqued my interest. I’m a sucker for stories about Boomers who refuse to go gently to that faded Barcolounger. Besides, who wouldn’t want to pull a Grandma Moses?

But I found myself more interested in the brain science research cited in the piece –research about how we learn. More important, how we can continue to learn even as many things, like our careers and our knees, discontinue. It echoes what I have long preached to my Baby Js about journalism and writing:

• Don’t quit until you get good.
• It takes years of practice to get good.
• The more you practice, the gooder you get.

In other words, as with pursuits like basketball, writers have to build from the basics up, and then practice, practice, practice. But unlike basketball, in journalism you don’t necessarily peak early, if ever. (btw, I know “gooder” isn’t a word but I also preach that when you learn the rules well enough, you earn the right to break them with intention.)

Here’s a summary from the “retirement” story:

 Researchers distinguish between crystallized (general knowledge) and fluid (problem solving) intelligence. Crystallized intelligence tends to grow over a lifetime, whereas fluid intelligence usually declines after a person reaches the late 20s. That’s why deciding to become a mathematician or a chess master at age 50 usually does not work. (Dean Keith Simonton, UC-Davis)

But art, music, gardening, designing, teaching, writing – creating! – can and, for many, do.

Needed caveat: This isn’t about one being better than the other.  In fact, the study cited above talks about the extreme value of fluid intelligence, and mentions athletes.  But it also underscores the life-long possibilities of general knowledge, if that knowledge is put to use.  How hopeful is that?

Another note in the story echoes what I preach about standing on a strong foundation of craft, then taking some risks with how you apply that craft:

 …there are two kinds of practitioners in most given fields: conceptual and experimental. Conceptual minds tend to be younger and typically better with abstractions. Experimental minds, on the other hand, take longer to gestate, working by trial and error.  (David W. Galenson, University of Chicago)

I suspect I have a more conceptual mind than an experimental one. Or maybe 40 years producing on daily deadline to earn a paycheck has trampled my experimental mind. No matter. I still believe in the possibilities open to those who refuse to stay stuck in who they were and instead risk learning who they yet can be.

Which gets me back to My Guy and basketball.

He never played at an elite level. Not big enough, physical enough or impractical enough. In his younger, nimbler days he was more suited to his passions as a backpacker, marathon runner and rock-climber. For life’s more practical haul, he mostly applied his brain (plenty big though not always as practical as I’d like) as a journalist.

Yet basketball always beckoned. He was well into his 50s when he still played a weekly game with his youngest brother and others 10 to 20 years his junior. The competition was fierce, the pace relentless, and the injuries not infrequent.

For years on Thursday nights, I watched him sling his sneakers over his shoulder and bound out the door, giddy as a 5-year-old heading to Chuck E. Cheese. For years, I watched him wince back into the house a few hours later, exhausted and bruised. For the next six days, he would moan about his bent finger and strained back, or grumble about the guy who pulled the dirty foul. But when I asked if maybe it was time to stop playing, or at least to play with people closer to un certain age, he deflected. Instead he’d tell me about the magic moment he had made one of those fluid moves. And come the next Thursday – the seventh day – the pain would be forgotten, He would sling his sneakers over his shoulder and bound out the door, giddy and forever young.

Until the post-game night he staggered into the house and collapsed into a chair. When he started to shake and sweat, I grew concerned. His skin was gray and clammy. His legs bloomed the sickly yellow that portends black-and-blue. I wrapped him in blankets, force-fed him hot tea and sweet jam, and wondered if I should call 911. Then I demanded to know what had happened: He had been slammed against a wall. Hard. By a younger, bigger, more fluid guy.

Looking back, it was bad timing on my part, but I asked again if it was time to quit the game. When he shrugged, I drew my boundary: “Play if you want. But don’t get hurt any more than I want to hear you complain about.”

He quit the game. I know he misses it. Just as we both miss our days as runners and backpackers. Just as I no longer believe he will learn to install dry wall or I will learn Romanian before my next trip to Bucharest. Our “fluid intelligence” is like the jar of coconut oil in my pantry: gelatinous except for those glorious moments it liquefies in the heat.

But in his mid-60s, My Guy has taken on a life-long dream as publisher/editor of a weekly newspaper in the mountains. He stands on a 40-year foundation of craft in newspapers and business magazines, and now is learning an entirely new way to apply that craft. He no longer runs the court on Thursday nights; but every Monday night, he writes a cogent, pointed editorial or elegant, personal column. Sometimes both. In between deadlines, he writes fiction that may never be published but gives him joy and maddens me with how good it is.

Me? My writing isn’t as crisp or powerful as it once was. It never was my strongest muscle. And I don’t practice enough to keep that muscle taut. So even these BackStory posts are clumsy, insecure time-sucks. But the trial and error of writing them stretches me, just as my new career of teaching allows – forces – me to learn something new every day.

For both My Guy and me, these ventures d’un certain age draw on our “crystallized intelligence,” and are proving sources of challenge, strength, creativity and surprising happiness.

This from The New York Times piece:

 “…being open to new experiences is one of the biggest predictors of creativity.” (James C. Kaufman, University of Connecticut)

I often tell Baby Js the story of My Guy and basketball and aging knees. And then of his ageless brain applied to the keyboard. Then I tell them that the dual challenge and joy of journalism (or any kind of writing) is that it is something you must practice, practice, practice – but something you can always get better at.

Something you need never be done with and that, if you are open to it, will never be done with you.