Life Wisdom - By Words of Taoism - The Beginner's Mind - Life Wisdom #62

Episode Date: September 1, 2026

In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities. In the expert’s mind there are few.More resources:Free resources, books and more on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://wordsoftaoism.com/⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠My Substack Blog:⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://taoismteachings.substack.com/⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Music I use, as a playlist:⁠⁠⁠ ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠https://tinyurl.com/spotifyzenplaylist⁠⁠⁠⁠

Hear that? It's your money calling. It wants a promotion. Elevate your savings with the Scotia high-interest savings account. Always earn high regular interest rates that grow the more you save and invest. Conditions apply. Visit scotiabank.com slash h-I-SA to learn more. Scotia Bank. You're richer than you think. Welcome back to daily wisdom. I am Chen Lee, author of the

the blog Word of Taoism on Substack, and you're listening to my podcast. Your mind is a prediction machine. That is the single most useful thing to understand about why life sometimes goes quiet on you, and it is worth saying plainly before we go anywhere else. Your mind is not a camera. It is a machine that guesses what is probably there, checks the guess against a small amount of interest, coming information and then hands you the gas. This is a gift. And I want to establish that before we look at what it costs. Because otherwise, this becomes a lecture about how you are not paying attention. And that will be both unkind and inaccurate. Think about driving home. You have done that route 2,000 times. And somewhere along the way, your mind stopped rendering it. You're

arrive in your own driveway with no memory of the last four miles. And your driving was fine. You stopped at the lights, you saw the cyclist, you took the turn. The machinery handled all of it while you were free to think about something else. The system has one rule. Once a thing becomes predictable, it stops arriving in full and starts arriving as a label. And this is where it starts to cost you something. because the machine does not distinguish between the things you wanted summarized and the things you did not.

Let me be concrete, because I think most of us feel this without ever locating it. There is the commute. Not a place anymore, just a gap between two places. You could not describe a single building on it and you have traveled it a thousand times. There is the town you live in. When you moved here, you walked around and noticed things. There was a period, probably about eight months, when the place was vivid. Then it became the background of your life. And now you drive through it, the way you would drive through a photograph of it.

There is the work you once found difficult. When you started, everything was sharp. You were nervous. You were paying attention to everything, and you were learning at a rate you have never matched since. Now you are competent, and competence is largely made of prediction, and somewhere in that trade you stopped improving. Not because you got lazy, because you stopped seeing the work and started seeing the category of the work. There are the friendships that have quietly become a script. You meet, you cover the same four topics in roughly the same order, you both enjoy it, and neither of you finds out anything new.

That has happened without either of you deciding it, and you probably both feel a faint sense of something missing that neither of you can name. There is your own body. which you have stopped feeling from the inside, except when something hurts. There is your own street on a Sunday, and there is the strange fact that a visitor staying with you for a weekend will notice things about your home that you have not seen in years. That visitor has no labels for your house yet,

and that is their entire advantage, and then there is also the face of the person you love, which might have become a label too. Please hear how I mean that. It is not a failure of love. It is the same energy-saving system running on the same setting it uses for the kettle, and it does not check with you

before applying itself to what matters. The people I have known who notice this in themselves usually feel a spike of guilt about it, and guilt is exactly, the wrong response, because nothing was betrayed. A piece of household machinery did its job in a room where you would rather it had not. I want to sit on that a second longer, because I think a lot of people carry a quiet verdict about this and the verdict is wrong. If your life feels flatter than it did at 25, the usual explanation offered is that you have become

jaded, that you have lost something, that there was a freshness in you which has been used up, and that people simply do go duller with age, and this is the price of experience. None of that is true, and it is worth knowing that it is not true. Nothing in you has been used up. Your capacity for details exactly what it was. What has changed is the size of your prediction library, which grew every single year because you kept living and learning and getting better at things. The flatness is not damage. It is the shadow cast by competence,

which means the situation is far more hopeful than the jaded story allows. You do not have to recover a lost capacity. You have to interrupt a working system occasionally on purpose. You can watch the machinery work if you want right now. Take an ordinary word like door or tree and say it out loud 20 times. Somewhere around the 12th repetition, the word stops being a word. It becomes a sound your mouth is making, strange and slightly ridiculous, and the meaning falls out of it.

Nothing happened to the word. prediction simply stopped bothering to deliver it because it had become entirely certain what was coming that is precisely what has happened to your street your work and possibly to someone asleep in your house but think about the last time you truly saw the face of someone you love for most people it is a photograph You're going through old pictures and one of them stops you. And suddenly you feel something rising in your chest. You did not love that person more in that second. What happened is that the photograph arrived without a label attached.

Your prediction machine had no filed summary for that particular image. So it had to actually deliver it. And for a moment, you received the face at full resolution. There is a name for what is missing here, and it comes from Shunru Suzuki, who put it in one line that has outlived him. In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities.

In the expert's mind, there are few. He was talking about practice, but the sentence describes exactly what we have been circling. The beginner sees the third, thing, the expert sees the category, decides what it is within about a fifth of a second, and moves on. And most of us have become experts at our own lives. Someone once told me about an exercise she was given. Photograph your own street, one picture a day, for a month. She thought it was pointless. She had lived there 11 years.

expected to run out of material by Thursday. What she found was that she had never once looked at it. The street changed every single day. The light crossed the same wall at a different angle each week. A man repainted his door in March. There was a tree she could not have told you existed, and by day 19 she knew the precise shape of it. Nothing had been hidden from her. It had been in front of her every morning for 11 years, and she had been receiving a summary called My Street. The month ended, and she kept going,

because the street had become interesting, and she could not work out why she had ever thought it was not. Now, most of us have an instinct about how to fix this, and there are three of them, and all three fail in ways worth understanding. The first is to go somewhere. Travel, novelty, a new city where nothing is predictable and everything renders in full detail again.

And it works. Four days somewhere unfamiliar and you're noticing door frames in the way strangers hold their coffee. This is a large part of why holidays feel like being alive, with the volume turned up. But look at what you have done. You have outsourced your attention to a change of scenery. It works while you are there,

and it stops at the door of your own kitchen, which is where you will actually spend your life. The second instinct is gratitude, and this one is subtler. You make a list. Grateful for my home, my health, the person beside me. The trouble is that the list is written entirely in labels.

You have thanked the summary. You have expressed genuine warmth toward a category without ever going back to look at the thing itself. And the third catches the people who think carefully, which very likely includes you since you are still here. Having understood the problem, you resolve to look with fresh eyes. Tomorrow morning, you will really see your kitchen. Notice what that is.

It is an instruction issued by an expert to himself about how to be a beginner. Tomorrow you will stand in that room performing the act of noticing, checking how well the noticing is going, and the checking will be the loudest thing present. You cannot decide your way in. The deciding is the problem wearing a determined face. So here is the impasse, and it is a real one. Every route to fresh eyes runs through effort.

Effort is what experts do. Beginners never try to see, because they have nothing to see with except in their eyes. This is where the Taoist reading changes everything. because it changes what we think is wrong. The Tauti Ching keeps returning to the image of a newborn. He who is filled with virtue, it says, is like a newborn child. And elsewhere, it asks a question I find genuinely beautiful. Can you become like a little child again?

Not if you can acquire this, but can you return to it. That single word moves the whole subject. This is not a capacity you lack and must go out and obtain. It is your original setting. It is still running underneath, covered over by several decades of extremely useful labels that were laid down one at a time by a system trying to help you. And Chapter 48 gives the method in one line.

In the pursuit of learning, every day something is added. In the pursuit of the way, every day something is dropped. You're not adding fresh eyes, you're dropping the summary. Those are opposite operations. One requires effort, and the other requires letting something fall away. And the reason all your previous attempts have failed is that you have been using the first one on a problem that only responds to the second. Now this does not mean expertise is the enemy, and there is an objection here that deserves a straight answer.

Should the surgeon forget the anatomy? Should the pianist unlearn the scales? Obviously not, and that is not what any of this is about. The difference is between having your knowledge and being filtered by it. Knowledge you have is a tool you can pick up and put down. Knowledge that has become a lens is something you can no longer take off so that nothing reaches you except a version of what you already concluded. Someone described this to me in a way I have never forgotten. She had been taking piano lessons as an adult from a woman in her 70s

who had been teaching for over 40 years. What struck her was that the teacher was never. board, 40 years of beginners playing the same simple pieces badly, and the woman would lean in and listen to a 14-bar exercise, as though she had never encountered it. And once my friend asked her how she managed that, the teacher said she had stopped listening for the piece a long time ago. She listened for the person. and there had never been two people who played the same wrong note for the same reason. That is beginner's mind sitting on top of 40 years of expertise. She has more knowledge than anyone in the room.

She simply refuses to let it answer the question before the sound arrives. So here is the distinction I would like you to carry out of today, and it is small enough to actually use. Knowing tells you what a thing is. Seeing tells you what it is doing today. Everything you know about your street, your work, your partner's face is accurate. None of it is current. It was compiled at some point in the past and it has been playing on repeat ever since while the thing itself kept moving. So the question, short enough to reach for, in a real moment is simply this. What is it doing today? And practically, here is what I would actually like you to try, because this is the part that works. Tomorrow morning, in your kitchen, do not try to see it. Trying is the trap. Instead, ask one question you do not know the answer to. Where exactly is the light coming from at this hour?

What is the loudest sound in this room right now? Which of these objects have I not touched in a month? Which cupboard door does not close properly? The reason this works is mechanical rather than mystical. Prediction cannot survive a genuine question. The summary has no answer to what is the loudest sound in here. So the system is forced to go and look. And the instant it goes to look,

the room comes back at full resolution. You need no willpower for this. You need one question your machine cannot fake an answer to. And then this evening, do the same with a person. Ask someone you have known for 20 years, something you genuinely do not know about them. Not how was your day, something you have never asked. What frightened them when they were nine?

Which teacher they still think about? What they actually thought the first time they met you? You will get an answer you did not expect. And for a few minutes, the label will come off the face, and there will be an entire person sitting across from you, who has been there the whole time. considerably more than the summary you had on file. Here is what I would like to leave you with, and it is the good news underneath all of this.

Nothing has faded. The world did not get duller as you got older, and you have not lost some capacity for wonder that children have, and adults do not. Your street is exactly as detailed as it was the week you moved in. Your kitchen this morning was full of a particular light at a particular angle that will never occur again in the history of the universe. And it was free and it was three feet from your face. All of it is still there at full resolution,

running, waiting. You're not missing anything. You have a prediction system doing its job slightly too well, and it can be interrupted by a question. That is the entire technique. There is nowhere to travel to and nothing to buy and no state to achieve. There is tomorrow morning, and a room you think you know, and one thing in it you do not know the answer to.