365QOD- Day1091

Beginner's Mind

"Why would you go to a school and start as a white belt?"- My question to a friend

Many years ago while I was working in a steel mill, there was one guy who was unusual.  He would spend his lunch hour working out.  So I joined him.

He was in his middle forties and told me that he has serious arthritis.  In order to reduce the effects he worked out every day doing martial arts.  He had done this for 20+ years.  You would never guess that he had arthritis.

So we would work out by doing different martial art forms.  He was a great teacher and a very different thinker.  I enjoyed learning from him.

One day he told me a story how he had recently signed up as a white belt in a new martial arts school. I thought this was weird.  He was a high ranking black belt in multiple styles.  It just did not make sense for him to go backwards and start as a white belt.  Apparently, this was something that he had done many times.

I kept thinking and thinking as a to why someone with great knowledge would go back and start at the very bottom.  His answer to me was that he knows the basics very well BUT maybe the person teaching him learned them differently.  The funny thing was that many of his teachers were lower ranking than him.  

This is when I learned that we sometimes need to humble ourselves and consider even less knowledgeable people around us as teachers.  I understood that a beginner's mind brings freshness to something that you might have done a million times.  It is very hard to be that humble BUT it is worth the effort.

I adapted his belief many years later when I taught martial arts as a white belt for years.   The looks on the parents faces as I was teaching their black belt students told me that I was doing the right thing.  I was teaching them all to be open to learning and that a black belt was just a learning point not an end to a journey.

Today's question is:

"Do you have a beginner's mind?"