There’s a famous Rainer Maria Rilke poem about encountering the headless torso of a statue of Apollo. Faced with the transformative power of the broken divine, the reader is commanded: “You must change your life.” Rilke wrote the poem in 1908, so I know he had not intended to capture the experience of renewing a learner’s permit for the third time before age 34. But as I gazed at an overturned CPR mannequin in a corner of the midtown-Manhattan Department of Motor Vehicles office a few months ago, I came to feel that in a spiritual sense he had been describing this exact scene.

“Honey, it is past time,” said the woman behind the desk after she snapped a photo of me to print on a form of identification most associated with sophomores in high school. She meant, of course: You have got to change your life.

Until that moment, I had rejected the embarrassment I knew I was supposed to feel over the fact that I was a certified grown-up who couldn’t drive. I was a born and bred New Yorker, devoted to pursuits of the mind! This rationale worked less well on my long-suffering husband, who once had to chauffeur me from Manhattan to Montreal and back. He pitched getting a license as an attainable New Year’s resolution. He argued in prepper-lite terms about catastrophe and survival. Increasingly desperate, he told me he would accept the classes as his own birthday present.

There was also a more research-based case, which I suppose he was too busy chaperoning me around to make: That it is good for humans to do and master new things. That it stretches our minds. This past winter, the journal Neurology published new data that showed that people who seek out intellectual enrichment seem both to slow down the onset of Alzheimer’s disease and cognitive decline and to lower their overall risk of developing disease and impairment. Around the same time, researchers at Trinity College Dublin showed that engaging in “stimulating activities” in midlife can reduce the risk of developing dementia later, even for people who are carriers of a genetic marker linked to the condition. Other studies have suggested learning can make us more resilient and engaged, bolstering the brain’s ability to improvise and work around challenges to solve problems. Post-pandemic, some research has demonstrated that seniors who push themselves to learn new skills experience lower rates of loneliness and depression.

Taken together, the results are sweetly lo-fi. While biohackers have been hoovering up unregulated supplements and injecting themselves with complex strings of peptide compounds whose names sound like autogenerated passwords, the current science seems to conclude that the secret to a longer and healthier life might be as simple as developing a bona fide interest. Somehow, I paid zero attention to all that. Life as a passenger princess suited me just fine. But then we had a child, and as he babbled in his car seat, I felt at last a piercing sense of ineptitude. Here I was, about to raise a son to strive and explore and fling himself from his comfort zone, and I was still refusing to operate an automatic vehicle?

A period of acute sleep deprivation seemed like not the best time to heed the Rilke exhortation, so I waited a few months, read alarming stories about how women’s brains shrink while pregnant, watched my son expand his landscape of possibilities from the floor and the bassinet to music class and solid food, and was soon after introduced to Vince of VMARE Driving School.

In the car with Vince, I adjusted mirrors and tapped the brakes. Then he told me to turn off the hazard lights and swerve out from the curb. I had imagined worksheets and preparation. Instead, I was cruising down West End Avenue within 15 minutes of making contact with the pedals and telling Vince that I had once flunked a standardized spatial awareness test so severely that the principal called my parents to ask if there was something going on at home.

“You’re fine,” Vince kept insisting. And I was shocked to realize that I was.

The pleasure of that rush of competence is one of psychologist Rachel Wu’s selling points as she hopes to entice her patients to attempt to learn new skills in adulthood. Wu, who teaches at the University of California, Riverside, insists that the practice isn’t a nice pastime. It’s essential. You either learn or wither. She cites a pair of recent studies she authored that show that the mere act of absorbing new information can boost brain function and cognition. “You’re not necessarily happier in the short-term because you’re feeling more stupid,” she says (fact-check: true). “But in the longer term, it can really help you adapt. It’s about independence.” There’s also well-documented evidence that learning can alter and enhance fundamental structures in the brain, enlarging the hippocampi of London taxi drivers who must memorize detailed maps of their city, per one study, and increasing brain gray matter in the occipitotemporal cortex in people who committed to learning three-ball juggling, according to another.

An hour later, I had driven 40 blocks without incident. I had turned. I had reversed. I felt a degree of elation that I knew was disproportionate to actual achievement. I experienced it less like the satisfaction of crafting a beautiful sentence or running a long distance race and more like assembling a European appliance. There was a discreet task. I completed it. It was nice to think that I was lowering the likelihood I’d end up a doddering senior, but here was an unexpected boon: The time itself passed in a kind of reverie, more pleasurable and more fulfilling than the hours that seemed to slip past me on unremarkable mornings.

The lesson had felt dense with information and input, a phenomenon that Martin Wiener, an associate professor of cognitive and behavioral neuroscience at George Mason University, would later explain. “It has to do with how we encode memories,” he tells me. “If you’re making a lot of memories, an experience will seem to last longer and loom larger for a longer amount of time.” Marc Wittmann, who studies time perception and is a current research fellow at the Institute for Frontier Areas of Psychology and Mental Health in Germany, adds that the more attentive we are in the moment, the more nourishing a particular event can feel. That’s what makes a weekend trip with friends register as luxurious and a weekend of errands a forgettable blip.

The lessons continued, and I improved. I learned to parallel park, something I reported to friends like it was a tale from an exotic land. (“And then! You turn the wheel all the way to the left!”) This revelation invited others to tell me of their new—and in several cases, more impressive—competencies. One friend picked up chess on a whim and now senses a strategic awareness in other areas of his life. I know people who have become knitters or joined mah-jongg groups or learned to ski in their 40s. The writer Tom Vanderbilt spent an entire year as a newbie, exploring the power of learning as he tried his hand at hobbies like singing and surfing. He liked it so much he wrote the book Beginners: The Joy and Transformative Power of Lifelong Learning about it. “I think people have this feeling that they have a quiver of skills,” he says. “You can reach for an arrow and add to that quiver not for bragging purposes, but for internal confidence.” In his own life, the cumulative effect of his experience was almost numinous. “It’s a cheat code for self-renewal,” he says. “You put yourself in these new circumstances, and you have to become a different person both physically and mentally.”

Toward the end of April, Vince told me I was ready for the road test. The plan is for me to be a licensed driver before you read this. If all goes well, my son—who is about to be 18 months old—will grow up secure in the knowledge that he has two parents who know how to get around.

I have never maintained a meditation practice, and I am not someone people tend to describe as “centered.” Still, it occurred to me a few weeks ago as my son sobbed over some small insult that I should show him the simple power of taking deep breaths. He pursed his mouth into a Cheerio of surprise and started to laugh. Then we blew warm air into each other’s faces for 30 luxurious seconds before he wriggled off my lap to find his fire truck.

It was mundane and exquisite to sit like that with him, not novel but a blissful swirl of feeling all the same, and one that I can only seem to access under the most particular conditions: Walking out of a freezing movie theater into the late-summer heat when the sun is just beginning to drip orange over the horizon. Waking up first on vacation and creeping into the kitchen to make coffee. Stopped at a red light about to turn green, the whole wide-open road ahead of you.