Brain Drain

The Art Of Learning + Remembering

Photo by Milad Fakurian on Unsplash

The one thing I’ve realized since starting to learn Final Cut Pro, my new editing software, is that I don’t learn as fast as I used to.

There was a time when I could open a new program, poke around for an afternoon, and feel pretty competent and confident by dinner as muscle memory kicked in and patterns revealed themselves.

Now learning takes longer. There are more false starts. More “Wait, where did that tool go?” moments. More trips to “YouTube University” for things I just learned five minutes ago.

At first, I thought this meant something was wrong with me. That my brain was staging its own little retirement party.

But after about a week of on-and-off frustration, something finally clicked yesterday. Not all at once. But with an internal shift where the user interface stopped feeling like a hostile foreign land and started feeling like home.

I woke up feeling like I’m no longer Final Cut Pro’s bitch. Not because I mastered it, but because something finally settled into place. The fog has lifted. And I know now that I’ve got this.

The funny part is that my brain refused to accept the win. Just when I was ready for bed, it decided it was time to replay lessons and memorize shortcuts, reorganizing all that I had struggled with earlier in the day.

I lay there half awake most of the night. Assembling puzzle pieces:

• Oh, so that’s how magnetic timelines actually behave?!

• Wait, that tool replaces the three others I kept hunting for.

• If I think of it like this, not that, it suddenly makes sense.

Turns out, I wasn’t failing to learn. I was just learning differently. More deliberately.

And maybe that is where aging really shows up. Not in big dramatic ways, but in these small, almost invisible shifts. The way new information takes longer to stick. The way forgetting becomes a feature, not a bug, in the process. The way I have to circle back to things instead of charging straight through.

Slower on the front end. Less brute force absorption. More repetition. But also deeper. Stickier. More integrated with how I think now, not how I thought in my twenties.

There is a subtle grief in realizing your brain doesn’t sprint anymore. It prefers to walk. Sometimes it stops to stretch. Sometimes it needs a snack.

But there’s also something beautiful about the slower pace. When something finally does click, it feels earned. Not just downloaded, but constructed.

Maybe this is what learning looks like now:

• Less “Look how fast I am!”

• More “Look, I’m still here, damnit!”

My memory isn’t worse. It’s just more selective.

After decades of experiences, emotions, references, and losses, new information has to find room inside a brain that is already crowded with content and context.

Maybe the real shift, for me, is that learning is no longer about getting smarter. It’s about remaining open. And about making room, again and again, for something new inside my mature mind that’s been to the rodeo a few times already.

Keep calm and keep learning!
Clint 🌈✌️

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MAN CRUSH OF THE DAY

PETER ALLEN

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Peter Allen