All of us are always only waking up somewhere, discovering ourselves and world again. We’re always rediscovering our tools and our resources – the most familiar objects, feelings, and environments are separated from explosive, dazzling novelty by just the thinnest layer. Cock your head a fractional degree and everything can change. Like dreams, each moment redeposits us in media res, amidst the action, ready – if we’re willing – to interpret everything anew.
This is what Zen has named “beginner’s mind.” It’s why our souls are nourished spending time with children, who most easily explore the world’s newness curiously. Treating categories as provisional, we’re free to play with shifting points of view. Treating every now as new, each moment is an invitation into wonder – the constantly refreshing skin of our experience sheds, showing and involving us in endless creativity.
If you prefer your truths to come as stories: Evolution, science tells us, is a tale of exaptation – adaptations finding new utility in new environments. Legs that served to clutch at rocks in tidal pools prove useful when those pools evaporate and fish must learn to walk. Elongated scales that served to keep small creatures warm at night allow a proto-bird to glide between two trees, inspiring early flight. A branch becomes a poker, then a magic wand, and human neuroplastic body-minds develop with a specialty in seeing things imaginatively.
Whether we're the agents of the change or not, our strength as human beings lies in our capacity to notice and to change the contents of our minds, to see the world and our place in it (of it, as it) with different eyes. Whoever we believe ourselves to be today is raw material for reimagining tomorrow (or today). Our tools are all hypotheses, and all we need to do to start the world over is learn to recognize our facts as temporary, our perspectives flexible, our lives a constant renaissance. Begin again and see.
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