Beginner's Mind
At the beginning of February, I needed rest and decided to put this substack project on pause for a month. I wrote that I hoped I’d return in March with springtime vigor, but I fractured my fibula skiing instead! Nevertheless, the time away has been full and revealing.
In our house, we’re in between periods of change and I’m finding myself both amidst and drawn to many don’t-knows: what makes the sounds in the MRI machine? what does my future hold? how does a musical composer’s mind organize sound? what will be the first plant in the yard to break the soil this spring?* is the tiny hole in the raspberry stem a slumber spot for someone? what am I capable of?
As happens sometimes, and luckily, I was sitting next to the bookshelf while wondering, and got the tickling urge to pull down a book I’ve barely read: Chop Wood, Carry Water. In the chapter titled “Learning”, the subheadings evoked exactly the wisdom I needed in tidy form:
Learning How to Unlearn
Learning How to Learn
Don’t Be Afraid to Be Afraid
Learn by Doing, Learn Like a Baby
John Holt, author of How Children Fail, is excerpted in the section about learning by doing:
“Not many years ago I began to play the cello. Most people would say that what I am doing is ‘learning to play’ the cello. But these words carry into our minds the strange idea that there exist to very different processes: 1) learning to play the cello; and 2) playing the cello. They imply that I will do the first until I have completed it, at which point I will stop the first process and begin the second; in short, that I will go on ‘learning to play’ until I have ‘learned to play; and that then I will begin to play. Of course, this is nonsense. There are not two processes, but one.”
In what I’m coming to realize is fundamental to my experience of creativity, I go through phases where I feel ungrounded, confused, and fearful, before my wise mind leads me to answers I already knew but had forgotten.
That was the case this month, as, in a prolonged state of feeling vulnerable and anxious, my back brain nagged at me for days to finally try my new printmaking press. I don’t have much printmaking experience, and I showed up to the process both with the expectation that I’d discover something perfect, and the fear that I would fail. My first night of experimentation was confusing and frustrating and I felt convinced that I knew nothing. Anxiously, I gathered everything I’d printed that night, smushed it into the leftover ink, and threw it all away. Immediately, I felt ashamed for doing so—I rarely throw away work from a place of emotional resentment. I barely even took pictures (see cat prints at the beginning of the post). That evening I wondered: why did I take myself to a creative process so foreign when I was already so raw?
In Chop Wood, Carry Water, Rick Fields writes: “It is in the beginning we are most acutely aware of what we don’t know. This not-knowing can seem at first like simple ignorance, but if we stay with it—if we don’t reject our ‘not-knowing’—we find that it is actually an important part of our intrinsic wisdom.”
Being in Not-Knowing creates opportunity for discovery. And for me, the space around and between Not-Knowing and Discovery is the stuff of life. Of course, I know this! I’ve known this! And I’ve forgotten this! And known it again.
I returned to the press.
Not-Knowing, Knowing, Not-Knowing, Knowing, Not-Knowing… This is my experience of creativity, and of living. I sit here saying to myself, “um, DUH! How many times do I need to relearn this lesson?,” and I think the answer is: “as many times as fit in a life!”
*Volunteer stinging nettle… harumph!
Love this! “I don’t know” YET!
I couldn't help but nod along as I read this, Sara. The anxiety of trying anything new, failing miserably, yet still managing to try and try and try again - gah! The curse and blessing of pursuing anything creative, I suppose. It's something I too have been doing, reframing my mind - I don't know *yet*. :-)