Today, I’m restarting this newsletter. What better way to begin than with an note about beginning?
Recently, I’ve been exploring the concept of ‘beginning again’ in an area of my life unrelated to writing.
Yet, how we approach one thing often reflects how we approach everything. I think this is particularly true when we focus on our embodied experience of relating to life’s challenges and possibilities.
If you’re trying to do something that feels off-puttingly hard at the moment, I hope you’ll find some resonance and a possible pathway for your own explorations here.
How come I’m still at the beginning?
I got my driver’s license when I was in my early twenties and it was a horrible experience: lots of stress, lots of money spent, and many failed exams before I finally scraped by. My partner and I didn’t have a car for most of our adult lives, so I never got much practice. But now we do have a car. Having never been much of a driver, now it makes sense for me to pick up driving again.
I plucked up the courage to book a bunch of refresher lessons at a driving school nearby, but they haven’t boosted my confidence as much as I had hoped. Recently, after several lessons and then a gap of two weeks, I entered the car with the same dread I had felt on the first day – and with the same sense of unfamiliarity. I found myself looking down at my feet and rehearsing out loud what the pedals are for: the clutch on the left, the brake in the middle, the gas on the right.
*
“Wow, really?” I thought to myself. “It this is the state of things then I’m not very hopeful that this is ever going to be a success.”
As I clunkily set the car in motion, I felt downcast, hopeless, and embarrassed at imagining what the instructor must think of me. Briefly, I thought of parking the car by the side of the road and walking away.
Then I decided that no, I wouldn’t do that; I would at least sit out the lesson. But when you’re driving a car, even in a learning session, you can’t just ‘sit it out’ passively. You still have to take responsibility for being as attentive and driving as safely as you can.
In that impossible tension between feeling inept yet still responsible, a question came to me:
Could you allow yourself to be a beginner?
The pebble and its ripples
When a question doesn’t have an immediate answer, it sometimes works like a provocation – provoking a reaction in our minds or bodies that we then have the opportunity to observe. One of my coach-teachers, Dylan Newcomb, likens this to throwing a pebble in a pond and observing the ripples.
I noticed two things in my question’s ripple effect:
First, I had not been allowing myself to be a beginner. I so badly wanted signs of progress, so badly wanted to feel that I was getting over my driving issues once and for all. There was not a lot of room for ‘beginning’ in how I was showing up for my driving lessons.
Second, as I contemplated the question, something was happening in my shoulders and my chest. It felt like a bit of letting go. I also felt more grounded in my seat. These effects were small but noticeable. They made my breathing a little easier. I found the driving lesson a bit more bearable as a result.
Beginning to write again
Right there and then in the car, I remembered that Parker Palmer wrote a piece titled ‘Begin Again’ that is about resuming writing.
I really like Parker Palmer – just from reading his books I consider him a mentor – so it was lovely to call this to mind. For the rest of the lesson, I silently kept feeding myself the words like a mantra:
Begin again.
Begin again.
Begin again.
When I got home I looked for the piece and found it with many sentences underlined and hearts drawn next to pertinent passages.
Palmer wrote ‘Begin Again’ at a time when was badly stuck with his writing. He felt tormented by this stuckness, and misunderstood by friends who suggested he wait for the next wave of energy and inspiration.
Then, one day, he watched a movie called ‘Begin Again’. There was something about those words that felt helpful and reassuring. Even in his stuckness, when nothing else seemed to work, he could imagine himself beginning again as a writer. ‘Beginning’ was a path still open, an instruction gentle yet powerful enough to bring him back to his work.
A poem by Wendell Berry included in the piece takes this one step further. It’s a tribute to Hayden Carruth, who, Palmer explains, was a famous poet in his eighties at the time Berry addressed him in the following way:
This really floored me, the way one old man greets another at the beginning, and not even the beginning of a great career, but simply the beginning.
It’s a daring thought: if all we ever did was begin, could that be alright?
‘Begin again’ as embodied instruction
‘Beginner’s mind’ is how Zen Master Suzuki famously encouraged people to cultivate an attitude of openness and not-knowing in their approach to everyday life.
I had not imagined that with ‘mind’ he might have meant something broader than the thinking mind. But now I am fascinated with our bodies’ capacity to support ‘beginner’s mind’ – in other words: by how we might find our way into accessing ‘beginner’s body’.
That’s what I imagine my chest and shoulders were doing in the car that day. Activated by the question – ‘Could I allow myself to be a beginner?’ – my muscles were feeling their way into what form a ‘beginner’s body’ might take.
I wasn’t consciously directing that process, only observing the ripple effects. But thinking about it, it makes sense that it involved small amounts of letting go, grounding, and releasing breath. My muscles were no longer ‘holding up’ a story about how I already have a driver’s license and therefore should be able to drive.
My ineptness no longer mattered in the same way. I could enjoy a restored sense of dignity.
I could think to myself: “If I only need to be concerned with the job of beginning, I can dedicate myself to this. I can make a basic effort to operate the car, follow signs, and look out for other road users. I can let this be enough.”
Prompts for your own investigation
Are there areas in your life in which you have not been allowing yourself to be a beginner?
Are there skills, tasks, practices, arts, in which you feel you ‘should’ have advanced, and be able to show advancement, so much so that you approach them with a lot of stress, or avoid them altogether?
What are they?
What happens when you throw a pebble in the pond and check out the possibility of being a beginner again?
*
As I’m finishing this letter today, this investigation is ongoing for me.
It’s ongoing in my driving. It’s ongoing in my writing, including the writing you are reading now. It’s ongoing in improving my Spanish, in practising falling without hurting myself in karate, and in managing tense social situations with my dog.
Incredibly different as these things are, for my body the instruction to begin again feels quite the same.
I wonder if it does for yours too – and if so, what this could help you find capacity for in your professional or personal life.
*
I’m all ears if you want to share a response – simply hit reply and write back to me.
It makes me so happy to greet you here at the beginning!
Catelijne
