I learned to ferment by feel. Not from a recipe — from proximity. Watching, smelling, tasting, adjusting. Hands in the jar. Learning what too-sour smells like so I'd recognize it before it got there. No one tested me. I just did it enough times that my body knew.
I learned plant medicine the same way. Not from a textbook. From sitting with the plants. From teachers in Guatemala and Peru who didn't hand me a manual — they handed me the thing and said pay attention. The knowing came through contact, not curriculum.
I learned motherhood this way. I'm learning to build a website this way. I'm learning to use a terminal and push code to GitHub this way — by translating the unfamiliar into the language my body already speaks, and then letting my hands do the rest.
This isn't a quirk. It's a pedagogy. And I think it's one most people have been trained out of.
We've been sold this idea that learning is informational. That you study the thing, understand the thing, and then — once you've sufficiently understood — you do the thing.
But that's backwards.
The body learns by contact. By doing it wrong and adjusting. By staying in proximity to the unknown long enough that it becomes familiar — not because you mastered it, but because your nervous system stopped registering it as threat.
Think about how a child learns language. Not through grammar. Through immersion. Through hearing it, feeling the shapes in their mouth, getting it wrong, trying again. No curriculum. Just contact, repetition, and a body that's wired to pattern-match.
That wiring doesn't go away. We just stop trusting it.
So when something new enters your life — a tool, a practice, a role, a technology, a complete reinvention of who you are — you have two choices.
You can try to learn it from the outside in. Study it. Map it. Master the theory before you touch the thing. This works for some people. It has never once worked for me.
Or you can translate it into something your body already knows. Find the bridge between the unfamiliar and the familiar. Let the new thing sit next to something you've done a thousand times and watch the pattern reveal itself.
A database is a root cellar. A commit is a fermentation log. Deploying a website is carrying the harvest to the farmstand. None of that is metaphor for decoration — it's how the learning actually lands in my body. The concept stops being foreign because it now lives next to something that's been mine for years.
This matters beyond tech. It matters for anyone standing at the edge of something they've never done.
You don't have to become someone new to learn something new. You can bring everything you already are — every skill your hands know, every rhythm your body's practiced — and let it be the ground you learn from.
The knowing you already carry is not irrelevant to the unknown ahead of you. It's the bridge.
If something moved while you were reading — there's more where this came from.