here's a little thing ppl never tell you, but is true. you can actually stop doing any creative process, cold turkey, for years at a time; pick it back up later on, and find that you have progressed in your skill level. seriously only because you have experienced. you have witnessed. you have observed. and, through all of that, you have aged. just by existing you have gained so much additional knowledge, skill, and information that you would not have thought possible.
sure, it may not be a massive jump in skill or quality, obviously parts of you will be "out of practice" if you aren't working the muscle memory. but it's these observations, hidden chunks of knowledge, and your life experiences that contribute to the greater act of creating over a longer period of time.
i know this because i am someone who serially picks up and puts down hobbies over a VERY long stretch of time (not just years! decades!), and someone who actively hates practicing, conditioning, drills or anything that requires me to do something for the rote "betterment" of the craft. without having done much of that at all, i still have noticed this every single time, in every single creative hobby i've picked back up. and sometimes it's not like, a directly transferable "Better" result, but it's using information i wasn't consciously thinking of before, or knowing some part of myself better.
i think this is probably my favorite antidote to the fear of aging i've come across yet. now that i've found this out i can't wait to see what i create with the rest of the years i have left. it's so exciting to think that maybe my best work is still ahead of me. and i don't care how long it takes.
I think another part of this is that the knowledge that you gained during active practice takes time and rest to knit together into comprehension.
There's a story I've told before about the time I woke up understanding the vi text editor. And I literally mean I woke up understanding it. Lying in bed, eyes just opened, struck by the realization that I now understood vi's model.
(Up until that point I had been an emacs user—not an advanced one, but it was close enough to GUI text editors that I could do basic tasks.)
I got up, went to the computer, started up vi for the first time in months, and proved that my new understanding was correct.
I had previously tried to learn vi, of course, but it made no sense to me then. I have no reason to believe that continuing to bang my head against it would have resulted in any progress. Giving up was necessary for me to figure it out, because the time after that, in which I did not actively think about it, was the time in which what I had learned knitted together into understanding.
The same happens on a smaller scale all the time when we are stuck on a problem and get up for a snack or bio break and the solution or another thing to try dawns on us. I think it's more commonly accepted, at least in programmer circles, that that's to be expected; a lot of us use that tool on a fairly frequent basis (whether deliberately or because nature always calls sooner or later). But it works on longer time-scales, too.
