Week Sixty-Three: Revisiting Early Experiments

In a conversation with someone last week, we talked about the experiments and how they have unfolded over the past year and more. Later, as I looked back over some of the individual experiments, I found myself curious about how a particular experiment might look if it were revisited, with the added learning and experience of a year’s worth of living. It dawned on me, as I sat with the idea, that life can offer many new discoveries in a year’s time, and this past year has been especially challenging for most of us.

And so, I invite you to revisit the first 10 experiments in this series and choose one to take into the coming week. Whichever experiment you choose, pay particular attention to how you experience it this time compared to the first time you explored it. Is it more alive for you now? Do you understand it in a new or different way? Is it more challenging? Less? What responses do you discover in your mind, emotions, or body that weren’t there the first time around? Also, are there new ways in which you understand the potential learning in the experiment that surprise you, that you wouldn’t have expected the first time you did it?

Also, to the degree possible, allow yourself to go into the experiment with a “beginner’s mind”, as they say in Zen Buddhism, with a fresh, open curiosity as to what you might learn. Sometimes, when we can engage something familiar in this way, we can be amazed at what jumps out at us that we didn’t even know how to recognize the first time around.

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