Gifts, talents & skills

I've been thinking about gifts, talents, and skills lately--and which ones I have and don't have.

I've never been particularly athletically inclined, although I did OK in PE. I had to get my first pair of glasses in 5th grade, and my vision continued to get worse. (Now, although corrected my vision is about 20/30, I'm legally blind without glasses or contacts.) Then in 5th grade PE I did permanent damage to my knees, which made them a lot less flexible. And in my freshman year of college I was hit with a virus which did mild but permanent damage to my inner ear, which screwed up my sense of balance. (I tried learning to ski several times on spring breaks with my family. I tended to fall down a lot, and decided I'd probably get hurt before I learned to compensate for knees which didn't make very good shock absorbers and a not very good sense of balance.)

I've now watched almost all of the Cirque du Soleil DVDs my library system has. I was reminded of something I learned a long time ago. When I watch the C du S videos, I have the same reaction I did when I went to the occasional dance program--I can enjoy the choreography and the skill, talent and coordination in a good performance but I know there are whole levels of meaning and emotional content that I am missing.

I learned in middle school that I don't have the manual dexterity to be very good at drawing or painting or wood shop.

Although I was an OK musician through high school, when I got to college I learned that OK wouldn't cut it and I'd have to practice A LOT if I wanted to be good there.

Although I love reading, I've never wanted to be a writer. I've never been interested in writing fiction. I wrote what I still think are pretty good poems while in college, but they all had to do with personal relationships--and for a very long time I haven't had a lot of personal relationships which are that close. And although I was very good all the way through college at writing research papers, and discovered that I still was when I went back to Library School in my mid-40s, I never wanted to write non-fiction full time. The part I really enjoyed was looking up stuff that interested me.

So what are my skills/talents?

I love to read, and read a lot. In the years that I've been keeping track, the most I read in one year was 276, with an average of 23 books a month. I love finding out about new books by authors I already know about and authors whom are new to me.

I love to listen to a wide variety of music, especially classical and folk/ethnic/traditionally based music from around the world, and enjoy finding out about the musicians I hear.

I still love looking stuff up when I start wondering about something.

And as crutches for my memory, I love making lists I can refer to. Hence the various lists on my Web page mentioned earlier here in my blog.


SMC