June 18, 2025: Starting Over

Tenneson Woolf reminds us that we can always start again: “We learn, we humans. I’m so impressed by the courage that people have. To stay the course. To let go the course that doesn’t serve. To nuance the daily. To trust the simple. To open to love. To be unflinching.”

It reminds me of something I once heard Thanissaro Bhikku say. Something to the effect that when you are first learning to meditate, you catch yourself again and again drifting away from the breath. You can catch yourself 50 times in a 20 minute setting, but each time is a practice of waking up. Practicing waking up 50 times is excellent. Start again.

Starting again is a key skill. If you don’t get it right the first time, you start over, with collaborations, with ideas, with commitments. It’s a complex world. We don’t live in it perfectly. It requires humility. It requires grace. It needs a breath, a second chance, a sacrifice of some resources. It helps to be able to frame it as a learning, but not to hold on to it as a lesson. You see that difference?

“Human perception excels at detecting subtle pattern breaks” writes Cameron Norman over at Censemaking. Spotting the exception to the pattern can reveal the pattern. It can also reveal the hint of an affordances that can take you elsewhere. That boring staff meeting that happens every week? Think about the delightful surprise that comes when something interesting actually happens. And then the insight “oh wow…I dion;t realize how humourless this whole enterprise had become…” A key question for querying the patterns we are trying to understand is “what the hell was that?” Dissonance and novelty shocks us into seeing the mundane and normal.

Starting over is essential to reconciliation. Not slightly-embarrassing-land-acknowledgement “reconciliation” but the real deal, where lands and material resources are returned to Indigenous Nations so that we can all start again. Like the Yurok have a chance to do in California. Remove dams, invite the salmon back home, restore health and stewardship and start the relationship over. These are not about us and them. They are about the potential of we together, starting with the first people and the first principles and the land’s own direction about how to build and maintain health and stability and relationship.

Let’s go. The land welcomes you to try.

And in the doing over, you discover. I’ve been at it for a couple of days, but these little notes posts, based on my daily reading, seem to gather around themes. Perhaps I’ll post a summary of the themes each week or so.

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