Small Wonder

In a few weeks I'm going to visit some of my extended family in another state. I don't know them well yet. Circumstances have kept me apart from them for most of my life, and now we're getting acquainted.

It's like being thrown into beginner's mind – with my own family – open and curious. I wonder, what if I could approach all my family members this way? The people I grew up with, married, or birthed? The ones I assume I know?

The term "beginner's mind" probably comes to us from Shunryu Suzuki, a Zen monk and teacher who helped popularize Zen Buddhism in the United States in the 1960s. A book of his teachings, titled Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind, opens with this: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

It seems that my mind has painted over each member of my familiar family layer upon layer of opinion, expectation, belief, habit. I've formed such a thick crust of "expert mind" around each of these loved ones that I can't imagine how to get back to beginner's mind.

Having a beginner’s mind means letting go of assumed expertise – “Oh, there he goes again … .” “I know how she’s going to react to this … .” But I think it’s more than that. In Leo Babauta’s zen habits blog, a post from last March titled “Everyday Wonder” starts with a reflection on how flying to a distant place seems miraculous the first time (or the first time after a three-year pandemic) but then comes to be ho-hum after a few repetitions.

And I don’t just mean the magic of flight — which our ancestors would have thought was sorcery, by the way. I mean the magic of toasters and heating and houseplants. I mean the miracles of each human being we encounter on the street, the wonder of having someone love you, the sacredness of grief and heartbreak, the joys of a berry. – Leo Babauta

For at least a couple of years now, one of my back-burner projects has been writing memoir, stories of my family, mainly for my children. Storytelling was not much of a thing in my family when I was a kid, and I failed to make it a thing when my kids were growing up. I want to add some dimension and color to their background, by collecting and telling them the stories of their ancestors.

But now I have a more urgent reason to pull this project off the back burner: the family I’m getting acquainted with might like to hear some of the stories of folks I grew up with.

As I write stories of someone I’ve known all my life, a strange thing happens, maybe a small miracle. I begin to discover in these stories possibilities, things I hadn’t noticed before, and my heart begins to open to the miracle of this human being I’m writing about.

It’s a small shift, and it lasts only a minute or two. Then my mind goes back to its habitual expecting, judging, and eye-rolling.

But this is one of the things I love about writing: how it opens my mind to receive these moments of wonder. I write in order to know what I think, but also to remember what I’ve forgotten.