Beginnings
I love the idea of beginnings. Newness. Freshness. A new start. It’s in the beginning that we find ourselves again - eyes bright - exploring the world around us because we don’t know anything about it (1).
An ending is a wrapping up (let’s call it a wrap! Can we wrap this up already!) A nice neat package with everything in it’s place. All discoveries have been made and lessons learned. You “get it” at the end. You receive a degree. A pat on the back. A nod of approval.
Now I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with routines or “knowing” something, becoming an expert. But I believe that life is best felt and discovered in newness, and it is our neocortical-monkey-brain that holds on to the old and wants to praise that. Our neocortex, the newest part of our brain (where language and calculation live) loves order and dislikes change. But this order it likes to put on the world is complete fabrication. We live in boxes, but the "natural" world is a bunch of waves. Life is about loving that which we've never see before, man. Waking up every day with a sense of curiosity and wondering what’s going to happen, rather than just living the “same-old-same-old.”
This topic of “beginnings” comes today because this is the first blog of the new me. Well, a new me in a sense (I’m freshly back from a 5 day meditation retreat and I’m centered again, feeling like my old self, but different somehow, more grounded. I’ll save my transformative meditation story for another day). All I can credit for that “groundedness” is more experiences under my belt. This past year has been full of challenges and disappointments (the love of my life and I broke up, I broke some bones and severed a tendon and had to have a doctor put me back together) that didn’t ruin me and, therefore, made me wiser.
Anyway, this really is a new me - a new me in many ways, and most important to this venue, a new me in that I’ve decided to reimagine my website and what that means for my social life and my business, among other things. I see how it’ll be good for everything, from my online dating (again, another topic for another day!) to introducing myself to new business contacts. But it's not all calculated like that. Really, all that neocortical reasoning aside, I’m doing this because I want to take my writing and ideas out of my head and my journal and share them with others who are interested (i.e., others on a similar spiritual (2)).
In the end, this new blog is about me having a platform to share my daily musing and all the new art, writing and etc that’s flowing into my life. My promise to you, dear reader, and to myself, is that I’ll keep my life fresh and lively so that we won’t run into already charted territory. In the end, I want to grow old with grace and style and I hear there’s no better way to do that than to constantly explore and rediscover and discover anew. I want to awake each day with an intense sense of curiosity and with the knowledge that it is a new day, a fully fresh and never discovered day.
Osho says: “All great discoveries are made by amateurs.” And what I take this to mean is that experts, or experienced people make a lot of assumptions. They have a framework from which they work and they never go beyond the reach of their expertise. If newness were to enter, all those years they spent acquainting themselves with the territory would be wasted. Einstein also said something like, “if we want to discover new things we have to think in new ways.” On one hand, the expert is extremely skillful and adapt, whereas on the other hand, they live a life of repetition. Whereas an amateur has nothing to lose. An amateur can be inventive and creative. An amateur has curiosity and takes into consideration all the vast knowledge they've acquired over the period of their life.
And it is my hope that I strive to be an amateur in almost everything that I do!
I'll leave you with a lovely poem:
The Secret
BY DENISE LEVERTOV
Two girls discover
the secret of life
in a sudden line of
poetry.
I who don’t know the
secret wrote
the line. They
told me
(through a third person)
they had found it
but not what it was
not even
what line it was. No doubt
by now, more than a week
later, they have forgotten
the secret,
the line, the name of
the poem. I love them
for finding what
I can’t find,
and for loving me
for the line I wrote,
and for forgetting it
so that
a thousand times, till death
finds them, they may
discover it again, in other
lines
in other
happenings. And for
wanting to know it,
for
assuming there is
such a secret, yes,
for that
most of all.
Notes:
1) And I might even argue that what we think we "know" about the world is simply our desire to make order out of something that loves to be wild. It's like taking a leaf and trimming it into perfect square because the jagged edge is too untamed.
2) spiritual is kind of a dirty word in my vocabulary.
