The Beginner's Mind - Life Wisdom #62

Think about driving home.

You have done that route 2,000 times, and somewhere along the way your mind stopped rendering it.

You 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.