I don't want to become an expert
On cultivating a beginner's mind.
There’s a concept in Zen Buddhism called “beginner’s mind.” It’s about resisting the preconceptions that often accompany deep knowledge, forcing yourself to approach something with the fresh eyes of a beginner, even if you’ve done it a million times.
Expertise isn’t bad, of course. But the structured ways of thinking that guide an expert’s mind have a way of occluding our vision of the whole thing in its naked splendor.
Basically: Take each bite of pizza like it’s your first bite of pizza.
There’s more to it than that, but Zen is complicated, and I’ve just scorched my mouth on a slice of pizza.
In my past pursuits I haven’t done well at cultivating beginner’s mind. When I was first learning about tea, I wanted to taste teas the ways my teachers tasted them, speak about them with the jargon that demonstrated a worldly palate. When I was a baby editor running a New York City dining website, I wanted to appear bulletproof in my knowledge of everything edible in the five boroughs. In my race past competency to achieve expert status, I wound up making lots of foolish errors along the way.
That’s just hubris, though. The beginner’s mind problem began when I actually became something of an expert. Sure, there’s a sense of satisfaction that comes from feeling like an expert, not to mention the social and literal capital I could accrue as a public nerd and writer. But I found I didn’t enjoy aspects of my interests that fascinated me before. I rarely felt surprised, and rarely sought surprise out.
So I want to keep a beginner’s mind for bonsai, to seek experience over expertise. Even just a few months into this project, I’m starting to feel the pull towards clumsily assembled pillars of early understanding. I can begin to put together different schools of thought—an important step in anyone’s education, sure—but dangerous to get sucked into.
With bonsai, there’s just me and my fire escape. I won’t have any bonsai worth showing off for at least a decade, and no one’s itching to pay me to write about trees. This is all for me, so I want to keep all the wonder and awe. I want to make each encounter with a tree like my first bite of pizza.
The trick will be applying what I’ve learned in this practice to other things with greater stakes. But there I go, getting ahead of myself again.
Tree reading
This from back in 2019, but it’s come to my attention that not every single person has read and re-read Hugh Merwin’s love story about a curry tree, and that can’t continue. [Taste]
A romantic tale of a miracle tree off a Texas highway that draws pilgrims in search of benediction. [Texas Monthly]