One afternoon last week, I convinced a friend to accompany me to a restaurant in Brooklyn to learn how to play Hong Kong-style mahjong. I’d always been intrigued by mahjong’s colorful bakelite tiles, the satisfying clacking sound they make as they’re shuffled. My mother plays the American version twice a week with the same groups of friends, a clubby ritual that makes me a little jealous: Why don’t I have a regular game of something going?
We were a group of 15 or so students, all new to the game. To begin, we played a dummy round with all the tiles turned over so that everyone could see their values and the teacher could walk us through each step of gameplay: Here’s how you set up the table, building a wall of tiles. Roll the dice to see which player gets to break the wall. These are the suit tiles, these are the honor tiles, the dragons, the winds.
Mahjong’s not a cinch to learn. Our teacher was excellent, repeating each step of the rules several times, asking us to repeat them back to him. There were whiffs of card games I knew, but I found the intricacies confusing: Wait, you need three identical tiles to form a pung? How did that guy just win the game when I was still working out how the flower tiles operate?
And then: Why am I learning to play this game when I already know many other games and I do not ever play them? This was the thought that snagged me, that made me want to politely claim an emergency and walk out mid-lesson: Why am I doing this? Ostensibly, I’m a curious person, one who’s drawn to new experiences, who wants to expand her horizons, to multiply opportunities for fun. Mahjong offers all of these things! But learning a new game is something I haven’t done in ages. It’s something kids (and their parents) do readily, but eventually, most of us stop. The machinery for learning new things becomes creaky. It’s not easy or comfortable to get that old mainframe up and running again. So many things in life are not easy or comfortable already! Why opt in to another one? And do I even have room in my brain, on my calendar, for another thing that I do?
The friend I’d brought with me to mahjong surprised me a few days later, when I had assumed we’d both decided that our lesson was diverting enough, but neither of us had the energy or appetite or brain plasticity to ever play again. “I got us a mahjong set,” she announced. “Now we just need two other people and we can play.” I thought back to our lesson, how I’d wanted to leave because I wasn’t mastering mahjong fast enough. Being bad at something feels bad. Being new is often unpleasant and embarrassing. Of course we default to doing things we’re good at. We like to be confident and comfortable and look cool.
But here was an invitation to community. An invitation to be bad at something with other people, with the goal of getting to the other side: a new hobby, a new ritual, maybe, eventually, that clubbiness I’d envied in my mom’s games.
I wrote a couple of weeks ago about how I think of this time of year as one of unclenching, of letting go of that coiled, withholding winter self and opening up to spring, which officially arrived this past Thursday in the Northern Hemisphere. The unclenching, I am now thinking, can sometimes be challenging. Deliberately moving from a familiar place to an unfamiliar one isn’t without its discomforts. I was reading recently about how, when a chick is ready to hatch, it develops an egg tooth, a sharp little structure on its beak that it uses to peck its way out of the egg. How incredible! How do we grow our own egg teeth, generate our own tools to crack our own shells, escape our too-tight enclosures and emerge into the light?