The first Saturday of the month, I saw Eleanor in the back of the community center, dabbing a brush into a tiny jar of water. She was wearing an old blue apron and had a stack of blank watercolor paper in front of her. I didn’t know her well—she’d moved to the neighborhood after her husband died the previous year—but I’d said hello at the farmers market a few times. She had mentioned she wanted to learn to paint. “Something to do with my hands,” she’d said, half-laughing, half-embarrassed.
That morning, she was surrounded by eleven other beginners. The instructor, a woman in her sixties with paint-stained fingers, walked around and glanced at everyone’s blank pages. She finally said, “Alright. Don’t think about the whole painting. Just mix one color that looks like something you saw this morning. Then put it on the paper. That’s the whole assignment.”
Eleanor mixed a pale grayish blue. She told me later she’d seen a crow on the telephone wire outside her bedroom window. “I thought, okay, that I can do.” She painted a small oval shape, then a beak. It didn’t look much like a crow, but it was a mark on the page. The instructor came by and said, “That’s a nice quiet color.” Eleanor said it was the best thing anyone had said to her all week.
But two weeks later, Eleanor quit. I saw her walking her dog and asked how the class was going. “Oh, I dropped it,” she said. “It was too much. The painting stuff, the drive, the whole Saturday morning thing. I just felt behind everyone else.”
I’ve thought about Eleanor a lot since then. Not because she gave up—that’s common. But because watching her reminded me of something I’d been trying to figure out in my own life: what actually helps adults, after a major life change, finally do the thing they say they want to do?
I’m a teacher, so I’m used to watching kids learn. A child will pick up a violin or a skateboard and just be terrible at it for weeks, and no one questions whether it’s worth doing. There’s a kind of permission kids have—to be bad, to try, to drop it, to pick it back up. Adults don’t have that permission. After a divorce, a retirement, a move, a death—we suddenly think we’re supposed to become someone new, but we’re also wildly aware that we’re older, slower, and more conspicuous. Every missed step feels like proof that we shouldn’t be starting over.
Eleanor didn’t fail because she wasn’t interested. She failed because the class was one hour long, but it required about four hours of effort when you counted the drive, the set-up, the cleanup, and the awkward socializing with strangers. That’s a big barrier for anyone whose life has just been rearranged.
I saw a different version of this story play out with my neighbor, Dave. He started running after his wife took a job in another city for six months. He’d never run a mile in his life, but one evening I saw him jogging slowly down the block in mismatched socks. I thought it would last a week. But a month later, he was still going out every evening at 7:15, rain or shine.
I asked him how he’d kept it up. He shrugged. “I put my sneakers next to the coffee maker,” he said. “That’s it. And I told myself I only had to go out for ten minutes. Half the time, I still only do ten minutes. But sometimes ten turns into twenty-five.”
Dave wasn’t being modest. That was the actual strategy. He didn’t say he was determined or disciplined. He said he made the first step ridiculously easy. He didn’t sign up for a marathon. He didn’t buy special clothes. He just put the shoes in a place where he couldn’t miss them. He gave himself a minimum that was so tiny it felt silly to skip.
That’s the opposite of what most of us do after a big life change. We buy the full set of watercolors. We sign up for a twelve-week course. We tell everyone we’re finally going to write our novel. The intention is honest, but the structure is all wrong. We’ve built a staircase with very tall steps, and we’re already exhausted from climbing up from the wreckage of whatever life change just happened.
The other thing Dave did—maybe without thinking about it—was link his new habit to an existing one. The coffee maker was part of his morning routine. He didn’t have to remember to run. He just had to remember to put on shoes after his cup of coffee. That’s what behavior researchers call habit stacking, though I don’t think Dave would get much out of that phrase. It’s simply: don’t rely on willpower. Relieve your future self of the burden of deciding.
This is where teachers actually have a useful perspective. We design classrooms to make learning easy. We put scissors and paper at a table where kids can grab them. We give short, specific tasks—not “paint something beautiful” but “mix one color that looks like something you saw this morning.” We break time into manageable chunks.
Adults rarely get this kind of design. We assume that because we’re grown-ups, we should be able to just do it. We should be self-motivated. And then when we aren’t, we feel shame. That shame becomes the real obstacle.
I’m trying to learn Spanish now. I started after my youngest left for college. Instead of buying a textbook and promising to study for an hour a day, I put a podcast on my phone and I listen to it while I walk to the bus stop. That’s it. The bus stop is five minutes away. I don’t understand most of it. But I’ve done it forty days straight because it costs almost nothing in terms of time or emotional energy. And last week, I actually understood the guy talking about his grandmother’s house in Madrid. It was a tiny little win, the kind that makes forty more days feel possible.
What I’m learning is that acting on a new interest after a major life change isn’t about courage or passion. It’s about lowering the cost of entry. It’s about finding a way to be a beginner again without an audience of people who know you.
I think that’s why Eleanor quit. The watercolor class had too many eyes on her. She was a new widow in a room full of people who mostly had partners waiting at home. She felt like everyone else was there for fun, and she was there to fill a void. That’s not a difference you can see from the outside, but it’s heavy to carry.
Maybe she needed a different kind of class—one with no instruction at all. A place where you just show up and paint badly next to other people painting badly. No teacher coming around to comment. No final product to show anyone.
I think that’s also why Dave succeeded. Running has no audience at 7:15 on a Tuesday. No one is watching you be slow. There’s no instructor to impress, no line to wait in, no small talk about where you’re from. It’s just you and a street.
So what helps adults act on new interests after major life changes? I’m beginning to think it’s not a course, a coach, or a bucket list. It’s better odds. It’s designing the thing so you only have to do ten minutes, with shoes by the coffee maker, and no one watching you fail.
I still don’t speak Spanish. I still can’t paint. But I’m still listening to that podcast. And the other day, I bought a small, cheap watercolor set—the kind that fits in a jacket pocket. I left it on the kitchen windowsill. I haven’t opened it yet. But I see it every time I wash a dish. I think one of these mornings, before I start the coffee, I might just mix one color. Maybe a grayish blue. The color of a crow.
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