Beginner’s Mind

            There are so many books on my bedside table waiting to be read, and notebooks filled with half-finished stories, and a pile of descriptions of classes I might want to take, and random pieces of ripped out notebook paper everywhere. I feel like I’m swimming in unfinished thoughts. My year of rejections has also continued unabated, even though I was sure this was the novel that would break through. And my health is still what it is, despite all of the doctor visits and medication trials and weight loss. I keep thinking that if I could just have a time out, I’d be able to catch up with my to-do list, but when I do have time, I spend most of it playing games on my phone or watching YouTube videos, because I can’t concentrate on anything more complicated than that.

            This school year has been especially hard, because no matter what I try, I am no match for my current group of students. We get our lessons done, but it feels like I’m doing battle with an army of court jesters each time, and I need days to recover before I can think straight, let alone focus on my to-do list. I’ve been questioning everything about teaching this year, questioning whether I have any talent for it, or if I can learn the skills I’d need to learn to get better, or if I even want to bother anymore. I feel like I’m hitting a wall, but I don’t know if I should push through it in the hopes that a breakthrough is coming, or if I should try to pivot to something else. And if so, what?

            Either way, I need to be able to write more each day, because there are so many projects screaming for my attention, and collecting rejection letters is too overwhelming without an ongoing writing project to give me hope. The problem is that I struggle with the transition from teaching to writing, and from one writing project to another, both because I don’t feel confident that I’m doing anything right and because I keep placing the voice of authority outside of myself, but not consistently in the same place. From the outside, it may seem obvious what I should do and who I should be, but from the inside I feel like a blur, like I can’t get a grip on who I am, what I’m good at, what I need to do, or what I want to do. There are moments, very short ones, when I feel like I’m on the right track, but then I’m off spinning in another direction and feeling lost again.

I remember learning about Beginner’s Mind from Natalie Goldberg’s Zen-influenced books on writing, where she emphasized approaching each new experience with a lack of preconceptions, and I loved that idea because it made my self-doubt seem more like a value instead of flaw, as if I was choosing to approach the world with humility, even though it really wasn’t a choice. I wake up most days feeling like I’m starting from scratch, having to re-learn all of the lessons and make all of the choices all over again, as if yesterday never happened. And it’s exhausting.

I wish I could figure out how to cultivate something more like Expert’s Mind, or even Advanced Beginner’s Mind, and wake up each morning with a sense of confidence that I know what I’m doing, but I’m not there yet. To be fair, there are a couple of games on my phone that I’m getting pretty good at. So, there’s that.

If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.

            Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?