Beginner's Mind

Dear Readers:

I have been thinking a lot these days about Beginner's Mind, a Buddhist concept that has major implications for our understanding of the writing process and improving our life itself.  Natalie Goldberg in Writing Down the Bones (one of the best books about writing out there) argues that returning to "beginner's mind" is "what we must come back to every time we sit down and write." This is certainly a best and a true practice.  The blank, white page is, in essence, a nice symbol for beginner's mind.

What got me thinking again systematically about beginner's mind--beginning at the beginning--was going back through Susan Sontag's essay "Thirty Years After..." in a close reading for the introduction to my current book project on Sontag's essays.  Sontag reflects that she always likes looking forward, and never likes looking back.  (The essay was for a reissue of her collection Against Interpretation and Other Essays.) Sontag often avers that she is always at the stage of beginning and that that place is the most exciting.  For me, that has been true over and over again.

If I had to define beginner's mind, I would say it is beginning where you are, in the moment and place and time where you find yourself, and with the tools readily at-hand, and knowing that you and that moment are sufficient to gain and do what you need.  It means recognizing what you know and what you don't know, and being excited to find out more.

One of my best examples of beginner's mind happened when I was an undergraduate at Marietta College.  One of the most monumental decisions that I made as an undergraduate (even though I did not recognize it at the time) was signing up for a history class on a subject I knew nothing about.  I liked the professor, Dr. William Hartel, who was my adviser, and I have often had the attitude that if I know nothing about a topic, then I have everything yet to learn, and that to me is exciting!  The course was on the French Revolution; when I signed up for the junior-level history course (I was a first-semester sophomore), I could not even tell the dates of the event(s).  My interest in this period and, in particular, what came before the historic events of 1789 in Europe have become a guiding interest of my research and teaching in academics, as my areas of specialty are English and European literature from about 1660 to roughly 1840.  That is perhaps my prime example of beginner's mind.

Beginner's mind also means the habit of returning to the beginning time and again.  I must confess, I tend to hate repetition, whether in teaching or exercise.  I have to stop and take a breath every time I go to the gym and do the same warm-up exercises that my trainer has prescribed.  I have to make a conscious decision to do it rather than run out the door (it's own form of exercise, I suppose).  It is the same with eating healthy, especially when it is perfectly good leftovers (that, by the way, is a battle I do not often win; I almost always opt to go out rather than face leftovers).  Yet each time has to be a new beginning--no regrets for the last meal or last workout, forging ahead from the start once again.

I often ask myself as I write both what I know and what I don't  know.  Sometimes, in fact, when I am writing, I am cowed by all that I don't know, and this can cause me to stop and stall.  When that happens, I return to beginner's mind, affirming what I know and what I know I don't, but can find out. The most exciting part of writing is the findings and indeed epiphanies one has in the process of writing itself.  If you always know where you are going, then getting there becomes less fun!