Practice

Today, we made some new friends through my colleague. We went to their house, only 10 minutes drive away. As Sean is having body aches (after a day ski trip with Thomas yesterday), I drove.

I am not comfortable with driving at first but the more I practise, the more confident I get. Today, I'm glad to be the 'chauffeur' and even drove confidently into the Monash Freeway (expressway).

In my previous experience in the freeway, I was going too slow in the feeding lane and the truck slightly behind me didn't know if I was going to go out. By the time I decided to sift out, the truck driver had decided to speed up and honed at me before overtaking me! On hindsight, I realised that the speed limit in freeway was 100 and not 80 and was driving way too slow!

Just like kids, adults need to be given opportunities to learn new things (e.g. a new language, a new skill) and even more importantly, the opportunities to practise on the new skills. I have had the opportunities to learn French, Spanish and Japanese only to forget everything now because I do not have the opportunity to practise the languages.

That day, I read a parenting book and one of the section had an interesting phrase.

It wrote 'I regretted not buying shoes with laces for my son. By the time he was grade 1 and went to school, all the kids there knew how to tie shoe laces except my kid.' The poor kid was never given an opportunity to tie shoe laces hence he never learnt how to do it.

Now I realise that learning is not enough if there is no practice. Without practice, one can never retrain or improve the skills.