10,000 New Sounds
On voluntary incompetence, fatherhood, and a broken scooter in the rain.
There's an Indonesian word — pelan-pelan — that I couldn't hear for the first three months I lived in Bali.
It means slowly, slowly. People said it everywhere. At the market. At the warung down the road. The woman who sold me coffee each morning would say it when I fumbled through a sentence, rushing the words out before they evaporated. Pelan-pelan. I'd nod, but the sounds collapsed into each other — I couldn't find where one syllable ended and the next began.
Last week, I said this in Indonesian: Nggapapa, saya akan bawa payung untuk jalan-jalan karena bisa hujan.
Translated literally: It's ok, I'll bring umbrella for walk-walk because can rain.
A year ago, I couldn't have assembled even that much. Six months ago, I would've stalled halfway through, the words dissolving before I could finish the thought. Now the sentence came out — lumpy, imperfect, a little ridiculous — and we both laughed.
The Year of Noise
The hardest part of learning a language in midlife isn't vocabulary. It's that your body hasn't been trained for it — sounds that need your throat and nasal passage to work in ways they've never worked, combinations of letters your brain has no reference for — no familiar roots, no cognates, nothing to anchor the sound to memory.
Children absorb sound like water. Their brains carve words out of the stream before they even know what the words mean. Adults have lost that machinery. We hear a wall of noise and try to think our way through it. Reach for the flashcard. Translate in our heads. By the time we've processed the first word, the sentence is gone.
For the first months of learning Bahasa Indonesian, this was my world. I'd memorized thousands of words. I could read them, write them, recite them in isolation. But the living language — the one the neighbors spoke on our street, the one the woman at the market used to ask how my day was, the one the mechanic rattled off while fixing my scooter — that language moved too fast. It didn't wait for me to catch up.
It's a specific kind of disorientation — not confusion, exactly. More like vulnerability stripped of mastery. You're standing in the middle of a conversation you know matters and you have no way in. You wonder if your brain will ever adapt. You're six months in and the progress is barely visible. You oscillate between frustration and curiosity, between quitting and committing — until one day you stop measuring and just... stay.
If you've ever committed to something before you knew it would work — a role, a relationship, a place, a person — and had to keep choosing it on the days when nothing confirmed you'd chosen right — you know this feeling. The humbling slowness of it. The surrender that isn't giving up but letting go of the timeline.
The Ear Before the Mind
Around month eight, something shifted.
I was on my scooter when the rain came — not Bali's gentle afternoon drizzle but a full monsoon downpour, the kind that turns the road into a river in seconds. The engine sputtered, coughed, and died. I was stranded on a road I barely knew, rain hammering my helmet, and I needed to find a repair shop.
I flagged down a man on his motorbike and asked — in Indonesian — if there was a bengkel nearby. He pointed down the road, gave me directions, and I understood them. Not every word. But enough. I walked my scooter through the rain, found the shop — just a tin roof and a man with tools — and explained what happened. He nodded, got to work. We talked while he did. Small talk. Broken, but real.
It wasn't until I was back on the road, rain still coming down, that I realized what had just happened. For the first time, I hadn't translated in my head first. I'd just spoken. The way you hum a melody before you realize you know the song.
I knew more than I thought I did.
I hadn't studied harder. I hadn't unlocked some new technique. What happened was slower and stranger — my brain had started building new pathways for sound. I just call it patience. Not mine — I was frequently impatient. The patience belonged to the process. Patterns I never formally studied were becoming familiar.
I think this is what the middle of any real transition feels like. You can't force the new pattern to resolve. You can only keep showing up and trust that something is shifting — even when you can't prove it.
A Father's Frequency
The sounds I'm learning are the sounds of my son's world — the world he'll grow into.
They're the neighbors on our street who will watch him take his first steps. Bu Ketut — his nanny, who joined us just weeks ago when Ari came home to Bali — singing softly as he falls asleep against her shoulder. The vendor at the market who already knows his name, asking me — in Indonesian — how he slept last night.
Ari is two months old. He doesn't understand any of it yet. But he will. And when he does, I want to be inside that world with him — not separated from it by a language I never bothered to learn.
I started learning Indonesian before Ari was born — knowing we'd raise him here, knowing this would be his world. I didn't realize yet that I was tuning my ear to the frequency of his life.
For twenty years I invested in skills that scaled — languages of influence, strategy, persuasion. They served me well. They also kept me fluent in a world that only ever expanded outward. Bahasa Indonesian will never scale. It serves one neighborhood, one family, one nanny who deserves to be spoken to in her own language. The return on investment is nothing you could measure — and everything you'd actually want. A conversation at a warung. A joke that lands. My son — someday — knowing his father didn't need to be fluent to belong.
Last week, Bu Ketut told me something about Ari — entirely in Indonesian. How he'd been pointing at the lion on the wallpaper and making noises, fascinated, reaching for it again and again. And I understood. Not every word. But the meaning. The warmth. The sound of someone who loves my son telling me about his day.
I didn't translate it in my head. I just heard it. A small story about my son, told by someone I trust, in a language I almost didn't learn.
If you're in the middle of something right now — a transition, a silence you can't yet interpret — something in you is shifting. Even now. Even when you can't prove it.
Pelan-pelan.
Three Practices for Listening
The Beginner's Hour — Once a week, give yourself to something you're genuinely bad at. No plan to monetize it, master it, or mention it on LinkedIn. Stay with it for an hour. Not to improve — just to notice what happens when your expertise can't protect you. What's left when competence leaves the room? You might be surprised by who's still there.
The Untranslatable Journal — At the end of the day, write down one thing you felt or noticed that you can't quite put into words. Don't polish it. Don't resolve it. Let the gap between experience and language sit on the page — open, unfinished, honest. That gap is where something new forms. What are you feeling right now that you don't yet have language for?
The Belonging Audit — Ask yourself: where do I belong that has nothing to do with what I do for a living? Not your network. Not your industry. The table where nobody knows your title and it doesn't matter. The room where your presence is the only currency. When did you last sit there?
If something here resonated, I'd love to know — what are you in the middle of learning, long before you're any good at it?
And if you know someone who's quietly committed to something that hasn't paid off yet — send this their way.