“In the beginner's mind there are many possibil­ities but in the expert's, there are few,” says Shunryu Suzuki in his 1970 master­piece Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. With his remarkably ordi­nary but penetrating wisdom put out in under 120 pages, the Zen master goes deep into the minds of the readers and enables them to have a very simple but profound perspective of living.

Anyone who has a begin­ner’s mind has the most beautiful mind. It is a mind with infinite possibilities. It does not have assump­tions. It does not belit­tle things and say—“Oh, I know it already. I have already accomplished that." Instead, it sees things anew each time.

You may be seeing your friends or kids for a hun­dred times, and each time your recognition of them may build on the memory of the last time you saw them. So you are not seeing them alone; you are seeing them as well as the memories that you have in the mind. And there are other impressions of the past that compound your vision.

It’s also the case with a new person or thing that we hav­en’t seen before. Oftentimes when we see them, we have a skeptic’s mind. As we aren’t familiar with them, we feel the need to be critical right from the beginning. So we see them as they are, plus our suspicions of them. While such seeing is sometimes helpful in protecting us, we miss the entire point most of the times.

What happens if we start seeing with a beginner’s mind—unclouded, unprej­udiced, and free from what we already know? What hap­pens when we put aside the ‘I’ and ‘know’ parts when seeing things? We see people and situations exactly as they are. We have a real appre­ciation of them. It widens our vision. It develops our wisdom. It enables us to do many things—understand things precisely, become better prepared to respond to situations, love people, develop compassion, con­serve environment, and keep ourselves out of trou­bles. In a sense, we can live fully.

In this space, I wish to dis­cuss things that resonate with our everyday lives, from a beginner’s perspective. If whatever I talk may sound familiar, I humbly ask the readers to try to see it with fresh eyes, discard the things that do not make sense, and if anything remains, let it remain.