Always be a Beginner

To be a beginner is to be in awe. It’s fun when you try something new; a sport you have been wanting to take part in, a class you have been looking forward to enrolling in, or even a new restaurant you have wanted to check out that specializes in some exotic foods. It’s exciting to try new things, but sometimes we get so caught up in the routines of daily life that we stop searching for new experiences to spice up our lives and settle for less. We get so exhausted just living the daily grind, that all we want to do when we get home from work is eat and flop on the couch in front of the TV. We forget what it’s like to have fun, we forget what its like to be young.

When we’re a beginner, we gladly take advice from anyone offering and try it out. If we are learning to ski, we listen intently to our instructor or to a friend who is an accomplished skier, we will be more than willing to get out there and give it a shot, even if we fully expect to fall flat on our face. We merrily advance from absolute beginner to novice, all the while having a great old time. We become more accomplished every time we attempt our new skill and soon we get quite good; however, at a certain point in our development we start to pull back, we begin to consider ourselves as very good and on our way to becoming an expert. At this point our focus shifts. The key concern now becomes less about having fun and more about honing our skill. We may become somewhat obsessed with our new talent and the fun may drain out of it. We become attached to our way of doing things, and why not, our method works for us. When we become accomplished at a certain task or talent we may begin to get lazy, we may have a tendency to feel that we have become ‘good enough’. At this point we cease to voraciously search for new and exciting knowledge and we stop learning. We fall back on our laurels and run the risk of stagnation and boredom.

“You can’t teach an old dog new tricks.” This doesn’t necessarily mean that the dog is old, the dog may be quite young but simply adept at a task and too stubborn and proud to improve their methods. To learn new things may seem like an effort. It is very easy to slip into a familiar manner of living where we run the risk of shutting ourselves off from new situations and new people, especially from younger people. We may feel that that the young have very little to teach us, after all we have been through everything they are presently going through. But we make a mistake when we assume that everyone experiences the same things in the same way. There are as many different interpretations of an experience as there are people experiencing it, each person will learn different things. We could not possible learn everything that a situation has to teach us, we merely learn one set of experiences; our own. So it would be prudent to do our best to listen to people in regards to all things, especially young people.

It’s hard work to learn from the young, not because they have nothing to teach us, but because we have difficulty communicating with them. For us to learn from a child we must remember what it was like to be a child; not the simple recall of events, but the essence of being a child, complete with the emotions and the atmosphere of experience. Personally, I can sometines feel rare snatches of that childhood emotion, but it is fleeting and very difficult to hold in the mind. It’s like trying too hard to remember a dream that you keep forgetting; when you think about it it doesn’t come to you, but when you stop trying to remember it there it is! This is how I remember the atmosphere of my youth, in fleeting impressions. It is very difficult to explain but I would describe it as a ‘tactile’ memory; it’s a pleasant memory but elusive.

For an adult it’s very difficult to fully remember being a child. Adults think with reason rather than childish emotion; at a certain age we learned that making decisions with reason was best at fulfilling our physical needs. Out of necessity we started to think with our heads rather than with our hearts; but this change did come at a cost, the degradation of imagination.

So in order not to miss what children have to teach us we should listen to them with our emotions rather than with our rational mind. They don’t teach so much with their words as they do through their presence, through our observation of them and the way they progress through life. We can re-learn to view the world as a child does, from a blank slate. It makes me smile when I look into the eyes of a child, then I usually laugh. There is not much knowledge there, but oddly there is wisdom. Their eyes are so bright and inquisitive, clear and receptive, like an exposed nerve; sensitive and vulnerable. Within this sensitivity lies tremendous power, the power to pull potential from the universe and sculpt it into tangibility. From nowhere we draw out the knowledge to create. We are a conduit for the manifestation of physical reality. We think about creating the presence of something and then through time that thing will appear.

Youth observe the world differently than adults do, they see it through the eyes of a beginner. Everything is new, exciting and intriguing; young people want to try everything out and cannot understand why we don’t want to play. A six year old cannot fathom why an adult would not want to spend their day playing with Barbie, just as a teenager can’t figure out why we don’t like the music turned up so loud that the windows rattle! Of course the answer to this is that we have, “been there, done that.” We have lived through those experiences, gleaned what knowledge we felt was important from them, and continued along with life; on to the next set of experiences. But we should not be so quick to assume that there is nothing left to learn from the things we have already been through, maybe we should take some time to re-visit these events now and then. I did not really want to play with dolls when my children asked me to, and more often than not I would say no, but the times that I did said yes and got my body down on the floor to play I do remember with fondness. These times made wonderful memories where I shared an experience with my little girls that was immensely important to them, I also learned the value of kindness and the importance of spending my time wisely. I suppose the next step will be playing on the floor with my grandchildren. It may be more painful to get my body down on that hardwood, but I’m excited to see what the next generation of little people will have to teach me.

If we take the time and make the effort to continually look at our experiences through the eyes of a beginner we will never stop learning. We will be open to everything and not shut out anything based on assumption. We cannot truly know what we may miss in a day if we decide how things will turn out before we experience them even if we have experienced them a hundred times before. Today is a new day, expect good things.

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