There’s a famous Rainer Maria Rilke poem about encountering the headless torso of a statue of Apollo. Faced with the transformative power of the broken divine, the reader is commanded: “You must change your life.” Rilke wrote the poem in 1908, so I know he had not intended to capture the experience of renewing a learner’s permit for the third time before age 34. But as I gazed at an overturned CPR mannequin in a corner of the midtown-Manhattan Department of Motor Vehicles office a few months ago, I came to feel that in a spiritual sense he had been describing this exact scene.
“Honey, it is past time,” said the woman behind the desk after she snapped a photo of me to print on a form of identification most associated with sophomores in high school. She meant, of course: You have got to change your life.
Until that moment, I had rejected the embarrassment I knew I was supposed to feel over the fact that I was a certified grown-up who couldn’t drive. I was a born and bred New Yorker, devoted to pursuits of the mind! This rationale worked less well on my long-suffering husband, who once had to chauffeur me from Manhattan to Montreal and back. He pitched getting a license as an attainable New Year’s resolution. He argued in prepper-lite terms about catastrophe and survival. Increasingly desperate, he told me he would accept the classes as his own birthday present.
There was also a more research-based case, which I suppose he was too busy chaperoning me around to make: That it is good for humans to do and master new things. That it stretches our minds. This past winter, the journal Neurology published new data that showed that people who seek out intellectual enrichment seem both to slow down the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive decline and to lower their overall risk of developing disease and impairment. Around the same time, researchers at Trinity College Dublin showed that engaging in “stimulating activities” in midlife can reduce the risk of developing dementia later, even for people who are carriers of a genetic marker linked to the condition. Other studies have suggested learning can make us more resilient and engaged, bolstering the brain’s ability to improvise and work around challenges to solve problems. Post-pandemic, some research has demonstrated that seniors who push themselves to learn new skills experience lower rates of loneliness and depression.
Taken together, the results are sweetly lo-fi. While biohackers have been hoovering up unregulated supplements and injecting themselves with complex strings of peptide compounds whose names sound like autogenerated passwords, the current science seems to conclude that the secret to a longer and healthier life might be as simple as developing a bona fide interest. Somehow, I paid zero attention to all that. Life as a passenger princess suited me just fine. But then we had a child, and as he babbled in his car seat, I felt at last a piercing sense of ineptitude. Here I was, about to raise a son to strive and explore and fling himself from his comfort zone, and I was still refusing to operate an automatic vehicle?
