Beginner’s Mind

When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can really learn something. The beginner's mind is the mind of compassion. When our mind is compassionate, it is boundless.

—Shunryu Suzuki, from the prologue to Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Every so often, I find it helpful to remember the concept of “beginner’s mind,” that style of mind which doesn’t see with the discrimination borne of expertise, experience, or prior knowledge. What this means in practice, for me, is to approach encounters and situations with openness, with fewer preconceptions than I routinely carry through my days.   

For those of us who have written much in our lives, and for many years, and who have also lived much, it can be a special challenge to approach the youthful, novice writer and their mind with this kind of openness. 

There’s a lingual technician in my brain, probably in most of our brains, and he/she/it has a lot to say when confronted with a convoluted metaphor, un- or under-developed ideas, shoddy argumentation, or a straining of what the poet Ellen Bryant Voigt calls “the English fundament of subject-verb-(object).”

While the above is all good data to take with us into a coaching session, vitally important, even, it’s equally important to put this intellectualized understanding off to the side when it comes to approaching a student and their writing. It matters less how crystalline our vernacular is than it matters how near to their level we can place ourselves, to forget a little bit about the technical for long enough to get closer to the essential humanness (and humane-ness) of clear communication. I find it’s a constant negotiation between knowing what I know, and knowing when and how to let that knowledge be a silent partner in the primary task of connecting and assisting where it’s needed.