REsources for Living
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Call me old-fashioned, but in my mind September always means the start of the school year. Yes, my daughter has started school in August for years, and goodness knows when the school year starts in your particular school district. But when I was a kid, you always started your new grade, your new classroom, your new teacher, with new books and clothes and possibly even new friends on the day after the first Monday in September.
As far as I’m concerned, September marks the start of the New Year, even if the school calendar says differently. Even if Rosh Hashana, the Jewish New Year, actually falls in early October this year. September is about beginnings.
Which has led me to think a little differently about beginnings. I tend to consider endings as hard. Endings involve loss, and grief that comes with losing what you cared about. Endings can make you feel like a failure, or like you have no control over your life. But here’s the thing about endings. You don’t really have to do anything about them. If you have lost a friendship or a job or a marriage or beloved stuffed animal, you will probably feel sad, and likely angry, and possibly guilty or regretful. But if something has truly ended, there’s nothing you can do about it, except just learn to live with the loss.
But beginnings, although they may be exciting and promising, are a heck of a lot of effort. It’s not easy to walk into a room full of people you don’t know. When you start a new job you have to learn a whole new set of policies and procedures. When you start a new grade in school you not only have to learn the classroom rules and meet new people and figure out just what your teacher expects, you’re also facing a whole bundle of new things to learn, from multiplication to writing paragraphs, from cursive to algebra. Endings may be hard because of how they feel, but beginnings are where the real work comes in.
And it isn’t always pretty. Anyone who has taken up the violin or the clarinet knows that when you begin to play, it isn’t just that it doesn’t sound very good yet; it sounds horrible. You have to get through a whole lot of shrieks and squawks and what a friend of mine calls “ironing cats” before you get to a single note that sounds nice, let alone a whole song. Anyone who has learned to ski or skateboard or ice skate has done a whole lot of falling down before they became fast and graceful. Anyone who has given birth to a baby knows that the process is messy and painful and exhausting.
Beginnings are really hard work. Which means that any time you take on something new, you’re basically committing an act of faith. We walk up to the open door of a new relationship, a new skill, a new job or hobby or idea without knowing where it will take us. But you know that you’re going to have to put some work in before you have any idea of what your new beginning will grow into.
And maybe it won’t pay off. Maybe all you’ll know at the end of a year of studying calculus is that you really hate calculus. Maybe karate or playing the flute turns out to be not nearly as fun as you imagined. Maybe the person you spent so much time getting to know turns out to be someone that you would have been better off not knowing so well. It happens.
And what makes it even more complicated is that there is no rule for knowing when you should have reached the point where you’re no longer a beginner. There’s no way to say whether if you kept trying for another week or month or year that what you’ve taken on might get easier or more rewarding or more fun. You just kind of have to take it on faith.
Or, better still, maybe you can learn to enjoy being a beginner. After all, if you’re a beginner, no one expects you to be good. Experts have all sorts of pressure on them, but beginners are free to just muck about and do their best and no one expects any different. And beginners learn faster than experts. If you’re really good at something, then there’s only so much room for improvement. But if you’re trying out something totally new then the amount you know changes very quickly. If you only know three words in French, but you learn six new words—why, you’ve just tripled your vocabulary!
But best of all, so long as you can remain a beginner, you get the special sense of excitement that comes with exploring the unknown. To be a beginner is to be filled with the sense of possibility, with the feeling of new worlds unfolding in front of you.
If you can keep that quality of being a beginner through all the weeks and months and years that it takes to become an expert, then life will never be dull, because you will always be on a path where you expect new wonders to arise all the way along your journey.
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