A while back I read Zadie Smith’s wonderful first novel, White Teeth and Alexander Chee’s collection of beautiful essays How To Write an Autobiographical Novel. Reading this kind of literature hits me the same way listening to Yo Yo Ma or Keith Jarrett or The Beatles does. The emotional impact, the clarity of intention, the chops that disappear in the midst of the experience! This kind of music used to inspire me to grab my bass and hit the woodshed. Nowadays it motivates me to write something grand. It also makes me want to throw my laptop off the nearest cliff (not in Illinois, obviously) and go watch Road Runner cartoons. Beep beep.
When I tiptoed into my first Meisner-based acting class in the mid-90s, I had no idea what the hell I was getting myself into. I just knew I wanted to give it a go. I’d had fun acting in high school, thanks to my friends in our subversive drama club. My hidden agenda, of course, was that the teachers would recognize me right away as the genius I knew I had to be—and that they’d insist on finding me an agent and sending me on my way to certain stardom. Right.
The teacher I lucked into for that beginning class told me something that has stuck with me ever since: “If you want to learn how to do this you have to be willing to suck for a while.”
A tall order, that. I was already a pretty good bass player. I knew that because people paid me money to make the low notes for them. Teachers throughout the course of my life had told me I was a good writer. So why wouldn’t I (somehow, irrationally) already know how to stand on a stage and convincingly play a character in a play? It’s a ridiculous proposition, but having experienced some kind of “artistic success” made it seem as if it should be relatively simple to do this other thing well. Maybe it wouldn’t be a snap but how hard could it be? Right, again.
That teacher would later become an important mentor to me. It turns out that his advice was an earthier version of the ancient wisdom embodied in the Japanese concept of shoshin. It comes from Zen Buddhism and means “beginner’s mind,” an attitude of openness, eagerness, lack of preconception, and egolessness about the study of a particular subject or skill.
Without shoshin, I’d be paralyzed by the very stuff that sparks my imagination in the first place. Impatience, intimidation and grandiosity are the opposite of beginner’s mind for me. They’re the most insidious impediments to any kind of progress.
Some days I actually manage to remember that.