Tag: Arrested Development

Beginner’s Mind: Reset to Wonder

“If your mind is empty, it is always ready for anything, it is open to everything. In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.” That line from Shunryu Suzuki and the idea of beginner’s mind have stuck with me as much or more than anything I’ve read. It applies to pretty well every breath and step we take each day, but it’s been on my mind a lot lately with different things–particularly practices and passions where you have to hit reset every time you do them.

Beginner’s mind has been loud for running, something I started doing when I was 15, but running doesn’t care how long you’ve done it. Every run is its own thing, no matter how good or bad the last one was. On a nine-mile run this morning, the races and distances I have run in the past don’t count. They don’t get me a step further. In getting ready for the Tuckahoe 25K (15.5 mile) trail race in November, I’m two minutes per mile slower than I was three years ago, when I was running more and in better shape. I may get some of that back, but I’m not really worried about it, I just like going out to run.

Seeing birds scatter from phragmites and cattails, watching cardinals and blue jays in trees along the rail trail; stopping to look off bridges at the sun coming through clouds; or watching a monarch butterfly fly across my path, followed instantly by a leaf of almost the same color, moving in the same way, mimicking each other, as God smiles and says, “see what I did there?” Even running on the same roads and routes I have run for years, there is always something new and different to hit the reset button and dial up the wonder.

Beginner’s mind has turned up during prayer or meditation, where what I did yesterday or last month or last year doesn’t mean I will show up, or make time, or connect today. If I want to get something out of prayer, I have to be mindful. N.T. Wright, in his book “The Lord and His Prayer,” says:

“Whenever we pray, that is what we are coming to do: to pursue the mystery, to listen and respond to the voice we thought we just heard, to follow the light which beckons round the next corner, to lay hold of the love of God which has somehow already laid hold of us.”

N.T. Wright

It’s funny how you can take something like the Lord’s Prayer, which maybe you’ve heard or recited enough not to even listen to the words anymore, but when you take it apart, pray or reflect on it line by line, or read about it, how it can take on new life, new meaning. Whether prayer, The Lord’s Prayer, or meditation, coming at it with beginner’s mind opens it to wonder and newness.

Each year, Uncle Chad and the kids make sand sculptures, just so they can wreck them.

Every year at the beach, my sister’s husband comes up with new ideas for sand sculptures. He and the kids have created airplanes, dragons, castles, all intricately and painstakingly built. But his end goal, the highlight of the creation, is when he has the kids destroy it. Sometimes they line up youngest to oldest to take their shots at it. The joy is in creating it, not trying to make it last. In that, their sculptures are like the sand mandalas the Tibetan monks create, simply to wipe them away. You start anew, every day.

Beginner’s mind applies to having new ears as well as new eyes. On the last mile of this morning’s run, the farthest I have run in a long time, Arrested Development’s “Tennessee” shuffled up.

I can’t count how many times I’ve heard this song, both when it came out, and from being on my running playlist for a while now. But it’s come to mean more over the last few years. The singer is talking to God and about their relationship. The song is a prayer.

“Lord it’s obvious we got a relationship
Talkin’ to each other every night and day
Although you’re superior over me
we talk to each other in a friendship way…

I ask you, Lord, why you enlightened me
without the enlightenment of all my folks
He said, cuz I set myself on a quest for truth
and he was there to quench my thirst.
But I am still thirsty.
The Lord allowed me to drink some more
He said what I am searching for are
The answers to all which are in front of me
the ultimate truth started to get blurry..

Speech (Todd Thomas)

There are songs whose lyrics wash over me new and differently maybe each time I hear them. At the end of a run, when legs are heavy, mind wants to be on autopilot, breathing is conscious, in a moment created and shared with the Universe, is an old song, a prayer, between a man and God.

Beginner’s mind is coming back for more. It’s seeing possibility. It’s starting again. It’s realizing we aren’t perfect and we don’t really know anything. It is finding wonder in the same roads, in the same songs, in the same body, but seeing it differently. It’s being thirsty for more.

And I am still thirsty.

Everyday People, Everyday Grace

give me
the daily
struggle,
because these things are my song,
and so we will go together
shoulder to shoulder
– Pablo Neruda, “Invisible Man”

Neruda saw the universe in an artichoke, birds, tomatoes, socks, seaweed, and stamps. And in the people he encountered everyday: a bricklayer, a woman gardening, or a couple on the street.

My first double-take at Neruda was in the late 1990s, out of college, trying to figure out what should occupy my thoughts, where life was going to go, how to put things together. Funny, I’m still wondering those same things. A friend brought “Elemental Odes” around and Neruda takes the time to look at the everyday world around us, to really look at it, and see deeply into it. He elevates the humble. Everything is full of stories and we are connected to all of them. In the same poem, “Invisible Man,” he feels everything around him:

but I smile,
because when I walk through the streets
… life flows around me
like rivers

When my head gets stuck in the clouds, I often turn to Neruda’s odes as a way to reconnect. Sipping coffee in the morning, listening to birds in the yard, watching the dog bum-rush the bird feeder, or being in a church full of 700 people–pouring out into the parish hall and under a tent, rain coming down–brought together by the love of one person who connected us all. Each of these things, from the simple, to the profound can be an act of everyday grace, connecting everyday people, if we choose to look at them that way.

I know “Everyday People” is a Sly and the Family Stone song, but the version I hear in my head with that phrase is the Arrested Development hip hop version, “People Everyday.”

We are all people everyday and that’s what we’ve got to work with. Through struggle, uncertainty, celebration, and joy, we get up and we go. Anything we are going to come to know, we are only going to find through our everyday lives. When we find and feel grace in those moments, we find something more. I dig what Anne Lamott has to say about grace in “Traveling Mercies:”

“It’s unearned love–the love that goes before, that greets us on the way. It’s the help you receive when you have no bright ideas left, when you are empty and desperate and have discovered that your best thinking and most charming charm have failed you. Grace is the light or electricity or juice or breeze that takes you from that isolated place and puts you with others who are as startled and embarrassed and eventually as grateful as you are to be there.”

I wake up, let the dog out, put coffee on. I walk through the yard, hearing traffic from the highway, I look at the tomatoes growing, and I sit down to read, to pray, to remember, to be grateful. And I hope to find, to connect with, to be everyday people living into everyday grace.