Losing and recovering skills

The last several days I spent some time catching up with old friends on a ski trip. I was together with all of these friends from a masters degree that we did together in Spain. Obviously it was great catching up with old friends, but this post is about something that I learned there and other times I've visited with old friends from Spain. It's about the joy and pain of recovering and losing skills that you worked hard for at some point in your life.

The first of those skills is speaking Spanish. By the end of my masters degree 12 years ago, I was speaking really good Spanish and it was the primary way that I communicated with lots of friends in Spain that weren't confident in their English. Over the years though, I really had no day-to-day use for it and slowly but surely it started to erode. On top of that, when I moved to Greece, Greek became my primary foreign language and it seems to have pushed out what Spanish remains. Now if I find myself trying to respond to a Spanish speaker, half the words are Spanish and the other half are Greek.

On a daily basis, this doesn't sound like much of a loss, as really I don't use it very much. But the pain you feel when you meet people who you used to communicate with so much better in their native language, knowing that you just can't do it anymore, is something that really underlines the years of decay.

But that doesn't mean the only solution is to use it or lose it forever. On the flip side, I was very happy with the level of skiing that I was able to get to in a 3-day period. This is after being on skis for the first time in close to 25 years only a couple of weeks ago. It makes me realize that the work you put in to develop skills is never really lost. You can always do a bit of digging and you will probably be pleasantly surprised by what's still there. I'm thinking that Spanish might be the next thing for me to try to recover.