In 1970, Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki published Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind, a book about the Zen concept of shoshin, or "beginner's mind."
"In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities," Suzuki famously writes, "but in the expert's there are few."
The idea of shoshin is simple: beginners on any given path—who have not yet acquired its biases, prejudices, and habits of thought—are more likely to entertain a range of possibilities. They're not constrained by what they think they know, because they're still learning.
Experts, on the other hand, tend to see fewer possibilities. Years of knowledge and experience teach them what works and what doesn't, what's possible and what isn't. That knowledge is valuable, of course. But it can also harden into assumptions that make it more difficult to see beyond what they already know.
Knowledge helps us grow, to be sure, but its acquisition can crystallize into something that eventually hinders new growth.
"In the beginner’s mind there is no thought, 'I have attained something,'" writes Suzuki. "All self-centered thoughts limit our vast mind. When we have no thought of achievement, no thought of self, we are true beginners. Then we can really learn something."
Nearly 130 years before Suzuki popularized shoshin, Ralph Waldo Emerson incorporated a similar idea in "Circles," one of his most intellectually unmooring works.
"I cast away in this new moment all my once hoarded knowledge, as vacant and vain," Emerson writes. "Now, for the first time, seem I to know any thing rightly. The simplest words,—we do not know what they mean, except when we love and aspire."
Throughout "Circles," Emerson argues that there are no real fixtures or anchor points in life: that what we learn, grasp, or hold true at any given moment is simply one circle within an ever-expanding pattern of concentric circles.
Acknowledging his own limitations as a thinker, Emerson writes:
But lest I should mislead any when I have my own head and obey my whims, let me remind the reader that I am only an experimenter. Do not set the least value on what I do, or the least discredit on what I do not, as if I pretended to settle any thing as true or false. I unsettle all things. No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker, with no Past at my back.
Of all the ideas I've encountered in Transcendentalism, this one resonates with me more than almost any other: that we don't have to focus so much on finding concrete answers as on running experiments.
Claiming to have absolute answers in a reality that is, at some level, truly unknowable, feels presumptuous. Committing your life to a series of experiments, on the other hand, feels rooted in curiosity and wonder. Not insecurity.
For more than a decade, I've had a magnet on my fridge—holding photos, homework, coupons, and drawings in place—with a quote from Jack Kerouac.
"I have nothing to offer anyone except my own confusion," it reads.
Kerouac, like Emerson before him, like Suzuki, understood the slipperiness of knowledge and experience.
Both are helpful, and necessary, and unavoidable, but it's possible to view them not as things to acquire and hoard, or to make law, but as starting points.
As ways to begin, again and again.
Consider: What's one area of your expertise that might be worth revisiting with a beginner's mind? What "experiments" might you run, or possibilities might you explore, if certainty weren't the goal?
Last week: The indoor default