We often expect our experience to predict what will happen. But, what if it doesn’t?
I started practicing mindfulness to become calm and manage my stress.
But in talking with Mindfulness Teacher Mark Molony (as part of On Experience), I realised this wasn’t what it is about at all. Mindfulness is not really about helping you feel better, it’s about using your experience more wisely.
The more we spoke about experience, the less certain I became that experience actually gives us answers.
Most of us think experience helps us predict what’s going to happen: ‘I’ve seen this before and I know how it’s going to turn out.’
But Mark suggested that experience doesn’t predict.
On his first day as a social worker at a hospital, Mark met with a lady who’s husband had just passed away. Based on his training, Mark expressed his empathy, ‘I know this must be a difficult time for you.’ But, strangely, the widow didn’t seem to be overly upset. Then she announced, ‘I’m glad the old bastard’s gone.’
Mark was shocked, his experience hadn’t prepared him for that response.
He suggested, while experience still matters, it’s often not enough to prepare us for what happens.
We think we’ve seen it before, we know this type of client or recognise this problem. But often we don’t.
As Mark suggested, our experience can be dangerous when we expect certainty. While some events are most likely, leaving room for a surprise is helpful to avoid being shocked by what happens in reality.
Further, he suggested that mindfulness created a space before reaction. Just enough of a pause to avoid premature judgement and leave room for making a more considered decision.
Further, the best practitioners are often slower to act. They recognise that their experience has a use-by date, their memory is not perfect and as the world changes we must also change.
Wisdom doesn’t necessarily come from more experience; instead, it comes from knowing when our experience no longer fits.
As a counter to this, Mark told the story of the great violinist Yehudi Menuhin. When asked to watch a group of children play he declined. Instead, he requested, ‘Can I play alongside them?’ The convenor of the session was confused, ‘You’re a maestro, you have all of this experience…’ And Menuhin replied, ‘It’s good to go back to basics and start again.’
The antidote to fast conclusions and instant judgements is the beginner’s mind.
While we often see the people with the least experience pretending to know, the people with the most experience often know when they don’t.
This conversation with Mark left me wondering if I’d again misunderstood experience.
We often treat it as an accumulation of knowledge, but perhaps its value is not that it makes us certain.
But that it makes us more careful.
Where in your work right now might your experience be leading you toward a conclusion before you’ve really looked?
This is Field Note #8. Field Notes are observations from my ongoing enquiry into experience. To learn more about how to make the most of your experience, read these posts next:
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