“What keeps me younger than springtime is that I’m still learning, I’m still growing. I’ve got experience, but I’ve got a beginner’s mind and that’s a blessing.” (Charles Lloyd, jazz saxophonist, inThe New Yorker, 8.8.22)
At my most recent virtual session with my trainer, who has helped me keep healthy for the last five years, I was bemoaning the stress of planning and implementing a house sale in Maine, a condo purchase in Portland, Oregon, and the Himalayan effort of moving from the one to the other over the next four weeks. I asked him if he had any suggestions for managing the stress and the journey.
He leaned forward into his camera, practically climbing into my head, and simply said: “let go.” I was taken aback. Letting go has been my mantra for years. What on earth made him think I still needed that advice? Anger rose; doesn’t he realize I work on letting go every day?
He was on target. Letting go – of stress, expectations, and anxiety, of the “to do” list that has to be “to-done” before I leave – is the most critical part of my transition. I was too deeply embedded in my stress to see the need to return to the beginning.
For me, letting go is connected to simplicity and curiosity, to starting over. It is a reset. Suzuki Roshi’s (San Francisco Zen Center) book of dharma talks says it all in the title: Zen Mind; Beginner’s Mind. What struck me about Charles Lloyd’s reflection is its simplicity and its wisdom. Letting go and starting again keeps him young.
In my last post, I talked about the importance of stones in my life. At 81, letting go is the keystone in my life’s arc. A keystone is the wedge-shaped stone inserted last at the apex of an arch. It locks the other stones in place and makes it possible for the arch to bear weight and stay in place.
My most rewarding experiences are when I let go and become a beginner again, put aside what I know, leave expectations behind, and learn something new. The experience can be destabilizing. It shakes up the apparent certainty of being locked into plans and the way I have always done things. It opens the door to mistakes, imperfections, and the excitement of discovery.
I am fighting history when I let go and become a beginner. My family were perfectionists – never admitting lack of knowledge, never revealing that they did not know how to do something. The standards were absurdly high. “If you want something done right,” my mother would say, “do it yourself.” My father, a professor of speech and drama, spoke in complete sentences, even at the dinner table.
Admitting ignorance was a sign of failure and incompetence. It was shaming. I learned to project confidence, certainty, did so with full English sentences. Confident, after all, was the way I was supposed to be, especially as someone born male. For me, it was a way to conceal my fear, ignorance, insecurity and the feeling of shame that I didn’t know something. Challenged, I learned to think fast and smart, to overcome those feelings, to prevail.
It is liberating to learn that one of the most significant sentences in the English language is only three words long: “I don’t know.” Not knowing lets go of the shame and fear, the need to win.
I recall the moment, 17 years ago, when I first stepped, cautiously, into a kayak here in Maine. The whole boat seemed unstable. As I stepped in off the beach, it rocked side-to-side and threaten to – hell, threaten to? It did – flip over dumping me in the water. Rookie move a beginner would make. I learned to love being on the water in my 17-foot Current Design Sirocco in any wind, any current, any tide, any level of chop. “It’s “tippy,” a boat handler said to me a couple of weeks ago as I set off. Unable to heft its 60 pounds over my head onto the car rack, I have abandoned it to my daughter with gratitude for what I have learned.
Or my decision, 22 years ago, to return to stage acting, something I had dropped at the age of 30. I had to become a beginner, starting over with acting classes at Studio Conservatory in Washington, DC. I was the oldest student in my first introductory “Actor’s Process” class, surrounded by people way less than half my age. I stood in the middle of the room doing some very simple exercises. I felt a joy I can still recall, the joy of being a beginner. The outside world slipped away as I said to myself, “Yes, this is exactly where I am meant to be.”
Today, I am starting over again, moving across the continent to a place I will get to know. Carrying with me a gender journey I have begun, filled with new lessons and excitement.
Charles Lloyd’s message is simple. Not knowing, finding out, letting curiosity roam keeps me young, though it’s all relative at my age. I don’t plan to take up downhill skiing or sky-diving and sometimes the stairs feel like a challenge. But re-starting is powerful, a fountain of youthfulness, if not of youth. Letting go, not knowing, beginning again.
My eldest brother is 82 and he went paragliding this summer. I wouldn't count any thing out. Being a beginner is also about facing fear by doing. You are "doing" so much. Not only are you in the state of beginning, you are in action. That is a very good thing.
Gordon - welcome to the west coast. See you at Powells or Vodoo.