It's at the start of each year that we often think about what changes we want to introduce to our lives, setting some New Year's Resolutions and the like. We were talking about this after zazen the other night, and I was a bit dismissive of such resolutions... I mean, how many have I ever really maintained for more than a few months (or weeks... or days...)? Maybe you've had better luck with them...
Rather than thinking about new habits and commitments, what about adopting a new outlook this year? Fresh eyes? Seeing the world anew, as a beginner, rather than the jaded expert? What about beginner's mind?
It was Shunryu Suzuki's
Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind (ZMBM) that popularised this as a Zen teaching in the West, but the idea goes back a lot further, and it's reference in Dogen's Shobogenzo a few times. The Japanese word is shoshin, and you'll come across it in a few places. Zen-influenced martial arts will often touch on this, and it's discussed in the business world endlessly.
Beginner's mind is the mind that is open to all the possibilities that arise in each moment. Think back to a time you were a beginner in a new skill - playing a musical instrument, learning a new language, starting a new course at school or university. Before you learn all the forms and existing theories, each new musical phrase or French idiom or psychological experiment seems fascinating. You haven't developed all the 'boxes' that you'll be taught about eventually. When you do learn those, it becomes easy to fit anything new into the structures you've developed. I'm learning French with Duolingo, and I've got to the point where I can see the form of a new verb and recognise it as a 'ir' or 'er' verb... this means I know that patterns to form the first-person singular or third person plural really easily, know how to turn a sentence into the future tense and so on. And of course this ability is vital: you're not going to learn to speak French or play the violin or sit your psychology exam without developing these complex conceptual frameworks. They help to simplify and categorise the world, they give you a whole context to understand the thing you're studying.
But they're also very fixed. My psychology students learn about attachment theory, so when they're asked to explain the behaviour of a child, they very quickly lean into whether this is due to the mother's avoidant attachment style... but they're not seeing the child in here-and-now as a whole. They've already leapt ahead and reached conclusions.
Don't we do this with so much of our lives? Our relationships? Our work? Our Zen practice?
Suzuki Roshi starts ZMBM with: "In the beginners' mind are many possibilities. In the expert's there are few." When we live as 'expert', we act as if we already know how to respond to our lives, to our experience. It's useful in some contexts... but it's travelling over old ground. Can we be determined to see our lives as beginners? To see all the possibilities of every moment? To hear our partner as if we've never heard them say that thing before? To see the street or office around us as if this was new territory?
In our zazen, it's so easy to feel that there's nothing new as we sit there on the cushion, like we've done so often before. But in reality, each moment is entirely new. We've never experienced this moment before, and to treat it like so many other moments that have already passed, that no longer exist, is to take our eyes off the immediacy and the fullness of right now.
When we do open our eyes to the freshness and novelty of this moment, it's full and rich and complete. That's not to say it's always pleasant: sometimes now is full of knee pain or grief or anger. But can we catch ourselves before we do the easy thing of thinking, "There's that pain again - will it never end? Why must I suffer like this?" We can really inhabit that moment, whether it's pain or grief or peace or joy. Beginner's mind isn't polluted by all our scripts and agendas and the feeling that we already know how to deal with right now. Instead, we just live it. Really live it.
It's liberating and exhilarating and wonderful and fleeting and sometimes even a bit scary. But more than anything else, it's real.
So, there's your challenge for the New Year. Not: quit smoking, start running, be kinder to the dog. Just: be truly present and open to our lives as they unfold in each moment. Are you up for it?
