The Golden Moment 2
Experience Alone Isn’t Enough
How does wisdom develop? Most of us assume wisdom comes naturally with age and experience, but everyday life suggests something more interesting is happening. Mindfulness offers one way of understanding why some experiences help us grow wiser while others simply reinforce familiar habits.
Looking around, that doesn’t always seem to happen. Most of us can probably think of someone who has been practising the same mistakes for decades.
Some people seem to become increasingly open-hearted with age. They don’t necessarily have easier lives than anyone else. Many have lived through enormous hardship. Yet those experiences seem to have expanded rather than diminished them. They become the sort of people whose presence somehow steadies those around them. We trust their judgement, not because they always have the answers, but because they rarely pretend to.
At other times, however, we all discover our inner expert. We become deeply attached to our own explanation of things, even when reality is doing its very best to offer us a better one. Confidence quietly hardens into certainty. Curiosity gives way to conviction. We stop collecting evidence and begin collecting supporting evidence. My wife occasionally points out that I have such moments. Much to my annoyance, she’s often right.
Life continually offers opportunities to grow, but it never insists. The same disappointment can make us more compassionate or more resentful. Success can deepen our gratitude or feed our arrogance. Uncertainty can become an invitation to learn or something we feel compelled to explain away. The events themselves matter, but they never tell the whole story. Equally important is the relationship we gradually develop with our experience.
If that’s true, then the passing years may have far less to do with wisdom than we usually imagine. Perhaps we need to ask ourselves a different question: what is it that transforms experience into wisdom?
Beginning Again
Spend a few minutes with a healthy young child and you’ll soon notice something remarkable. Almost everything captures their attention. A stick becomes a magic wand. A beetle deserves five minutes of careful inspection. An ordinary puddle can be irresistible. They approach the world with curiosity rather than certainty because almost everything is new.
As adults, things become more complicated. We accumulate knowledge, skills and experience, and that’s usually a very good thing. I have no desire to be treated by a surgeon who approaches my appendix with the wide-eyed curiosity of a four-year-old.
The trouble begins when expertise slips into certainty. We stop looking quite so carefully because we assume we’ve seen it all before. We begin noticing what fits our existing explanations and overlooking what doesn’t. Experience, instead of continuing to enlarge our understanding, starts confirming what we already believe.
Wisdom seems to involve a curious paradox. It asks us to value knowledge while never allowing knowledge to replace curiosity. We need enough experience to recognise patterns, yet enough openness to notice when those patterns no longer fit.
In Zen Buddhism, this attitude is known as Beginner’s Mind. It doesn’t mean pretending we know nothing. It means approaching each new experience with the willingness to discover that there is still something new to learn.
Within Mindful Representations, four qualities help us do exactly that: curiosity, courage, compassion and humility. They are not just admirable attitudes. They allow experience to be our teacher and transform experience into wisdom.
Learning From the Garden
Imagine two neighbours whose tomato plants have produced a disappointing crop. One is curious. The other is an expert—or at least thinks he is.
Before you decide which gardener you are, I should confess that I’ve been both—and, depending on the day, still am. My suspicion is that most of us have. We all have moments when curiosity gets the better of us, and others when we’re convinced we’ve already worked it all out.
The first gardener notices that something isn’t right but resists the temptation to settle too quickly on an explanation. Instead, she becomes curious. She looks more closely at the leaves, notices where the sunlight falls during the day, asks more experienced gardeners what they think and experiments with different watering schedules. Gradually she begins to notice relationships that had previously escaped her attention.
Eventually she discovers that the roots of a large nearby tree are competing with the vegetable bed for water. The following year she moves the tomatoes, enriches the soil with compost and enjoys a much healthier crop.
Over the following seasons she continues to learn. Some varieties cope better with the local climate than others. Small changes in planting time reduce fungal disease. Each growing season reshapes the way she approaches the next.
Her neighbour has been gardening for just as many years. His tomatoes fail for many of the same reasons, but he quickly concludes that the fertiliser must be the problem.
He buys a different brand. When that doesn’t help, he uses twice as much. When someone suggests the nearby trees might be responsible, he dismisses the idea because he’s always grown tomatoes in that spot. Each disappointing season strengthens his confidence that his original explanation must be right.
Both gardeners accumulate exactly the same number of years of experience. The difference is that one allows experience to keep teaching her, while the other expects experience to confirm what he already believes.
The difference has very little to do with tomatoes
Four Essential Attitudes for Learning
The obvious question is what allows the first gardener to keep learning while the second gradually stops.
Certainly, intelligence, a good memory, experience, sound advice and even dumb luck all play a part. I’ve met people who seem generously endowed with all five. The rest of us have to work a little harder.
But there is something else that determines whether those advantages are used wisely. It lies in the attitudes we bring to our experience.
I have come to believe that four attitudes are particularly important: curiosity, courage, compassion and humility. Together, they determine whether life remains a teacher or gradually becomes little more than a mirror reflecting back what we already think we know. They also lie at the heart of Mindful Representations, shaping not only how we learn from experience but also how we practise mindfulness in everyday life.
Curiosity comes first because it keeps us learning. It is more than wanting answers. It is an openness to surprise. Curiosity reminds us that every experience, pleasant or painful, may have something to teach us if we are willing to look closely enough. Unfortunately, life doesn’t usually put the lesson in bold print.
Courage comes next because genuine learning often asks us to cross uncomfortable thresholds. Sometimes it challenges long-held assumptions. Sometimes it invites us to admit we were wrong. Curiously, this always seems easier when we’re talking about somebody else’s mistakes.
Perhaps these four attitudes are easier to understand when we see them working together than when we consider them one at a time.
Sometimes curiosity asks us to remain with uncertainty a little longer instead of rushing towards easy answers. It is usually far easier to explain away evidence that doesn’t fit than to rethink our understanding.
Compassion for ourselves and others is equally important because learning inevitably involves disappointment and failure. Every gardener has seasons when little seems to flourish despite their best efforts. Some years you’re almost embarrassed by the abundance. Other years you’re grateful if the parsley survives.
If every mistake becomes another opportunity for harsh self-criticism, learning soon gives way to discouragement or denial. It’s difficult to learn from our mistakes if we’re too busy trying to hide them. Compassion allows us to acknowledge our mistakes honestly. It gives us the confidence to begin again and naturally leads us to the final attitude: humility.
Humility does not mean thinking less of ourselves. Nor is it the same as modesty, which is often more about making ourselves a smaller target. Humility means acknowledging our true size. Being neither bigger nor smaller than we really are. Easier said than done, of course. Most of us manage both before lunch.
Humility allows us to recognise when what we are doing isn’t working, accept our limitations, seek help when we need it and continue allowing reality to be our teacher, even when its lessons are uncomfortable.
Like any garden, these qualities need tending. Some seasons they seem to flourish almost effortlessly. At other times they require patience and persistence. Either way, they continue to develop throughout our lives. The more consistently we bring them to our experience, the more naturally they begin to shape not only how we learn, but how we live.
Learning to Stay a While
Knowing that curiosity, courage, compassion and humility are important is one thing. Learning to embody them in the middle of ordinary life is something else entirely. That is where mindfulness enters the picture.
Within Mindful Representations, mindfulness is much more than paying attention or learning a meditation technique. It is a practical way of cultivating wisdom through our everyday experience. It is the practice of bringing these four attitudes consciously into our experience. The pause creates the opportunity. Curiosity, courage, compassion and humility determine what we do with it.
It often begins with something surprisingly ordinary. You arrive at work and pause for a single breath before opening the door to a difficult meeting. Rather than rushing straight in on autopilot, you take a mindful check-in. You notice your thoughts, your emotions and the sensations in your body. You remember the four attitudes you are trying to cultivate, then step forward with a little more awareness than you would have otherwise.
Sometimes that pause lasts no longer than a single breath. Sometimes it is a mindful check-in before entering a difficult meeting, a mindful transition between one part of the day and the next, a brief body scan while waiting in a queue, or the willingness to stay with discomfort instead of immediately escaping it. At other times it might involve leaning gently into challenge, experimenting with a different response or noticing an urge without acting on it.
None of these practices is especially dramatic. In fact, they can seem almost too simple to make much difference. That’s one of the reasons they’re so easy to overlook.
These are just some of the practices I explore in Stay a While: The Small Pause That Opens Something New, the first book in this trilogy. Drawing on my own journey, the book explores how mindfulness can gradually become woven into the fabric of everyday life rather than remaining something we do only on a meditation cushion.
Yet something interesting happens when we keep returning to these small pauses. Each one creates a little more space between what happens and how we respond. Over time, curiosity, courage, compassion and humility begin showing up a little more often before old habits do.
This is one of the reasons I encourage people to begin with mindfulness in action. It has immediate relevance to everyday life. It can be particularly helpful for people recovering from trauma, living with ADHD or discovering that the pace of modern life has quietly eroded their capacity to sustain attention. None of us has escaped the constant invitations to hurry.
As these brief practices become familiar, people often find themselves staying a while without really intending to. One mindful breath becomes three. A one-minute pause gradually becomes five. Formal mindfulness practice no longer feels like another task on the to-do list but a natural extension of something that is already enriching everyday life.
Mindfulness in action and formal meditation then begin supporting one another. The awareness cultivated during formal practice enriches everyday life, while everyday life provides endless opportunities to deepen what we discover during meditation.
That continuing relationship between formal practice and everyday life forms the bridge to the second book in this trilogy, Cultivating the Golden Moment, where we explore how spending longer periods in mindful awareness gradually develops the holding capacity from which open awareness—and eventually the Golden Moment—can emerge.
How Experience Shapes Us
Whether we realise it or not, every experience leaves some kind of trace.
Imagine walking through a forest. The first person has to push through scrub and step over fallen branches. But as more people follow, a path gradually appears. Eventually it becomes the obvious way to travel. Our minds develop in much the same way. Repeated experiences create well-worn pathways that shape how we think, feel and respond.
Some experiences teach us practical skills. As children, we learnt to read, ride a bicycle and eventually drive a car. At first these demanded enormous concentration. Over time they became so familiar that we barely thought about them. Experience had changed us. Fortunately, most of us no longer have to give ourselves a pep talk before tying our shoelaces.
Other experiences shape us in less obvious ways.
A loving relationship may gradually make us more trusting. A thoughtful teacher can awaken confidence that lasts a lifetime. Equally, trauma, prolonged stress, grief or repeated criticism can leave us more guarded, more vigilant or quicker to expect the worst. We rarely decide to become these versions of ourselves. They emerge as our minds and bodies adapt to what life has asked of them.
This capacity to be shaped by experience does not end in childhood. Modern neuroscience has shown that our brains continue changing throughout life in response to what we repeatedly think, feel and do. This remarkable capacity is known as neuroplasticity.
When I first encountered the idea, it struck me as both profoundly hopeful and surprisingly familiar. My first thought wasn’t, “What a revolutionary discovery.” It was, “Haven’t gardeners, teachers and grandparents been telling us this for generations?”
We already know that practice makes a musician more skilful, that exercise strengthens the body, that psychotherapy can change long-established patterns of thinking and that supportive relationships can help people heal after adversity. Experience changes us because we are continually adapting to it.
Mindfulness practice is another way of participating consciously in that lifelong process.
Every time we pause before reacting, remain present with an uncomfortable feeling or approach a familiar situation with a little more curiosity and compassion, we are doing more than having a different experience in that moment. We are gradually cultivating different habits of mind. The changes are usually so gradual that we barely notice them while they’re happening. Then one day we respond to a familiar situation in a way that quietly surprises us. Only when we look back do we realise something has been changing for quite some time.
This is one of the reasons I find neuroplasticity so encouraging. It reminds us that wisdom is not simply something we acquire through the passing years. Like the gardener who gradually learns to work with the seasons, we are continually being shaped by the way we meet our experience. The more consciously we participate in that process, the more opportunity there is for wisdom to emerge.
Going Deeper
The informal mindfulness practices explored in Stay a While: The Small Pause That Opens Something New provide a practical way of bringing greater awareness into everyday life. For many people, they are all that is needed to cultivate a calmer, wiser and more compassionate way of living.
Others, however, discover that these brief pauses awaken a deeper curiosity.
What happens if I stay a little longer?
That simple question has been drawing people towards formal mindfulness practice for thousands of years.
Rather than waiting for opportunities to arise during the day, formal practice creates a dedicated space to observe the unfolding of experience. It allows us to become more familiar with the habits of our own minds, to notice how thoughts, emotions and bodily sensations come and go, and to discover that we are capable of remaining present for longer than we might once have imagined.
Like any worthwhile skill, this capacity develops gradually. Some days practice feels effortless. On other days the mind seems to have mistaken meditation for an opportunity to rehearse every unfinished conversation, shopping list and mildly embarrassing moment from the past twenty years. Fortunately, that’s perfectly normal.
Yet, with patience and persistence, something begins to change. We are no longer quite so easily swept away by every thought or emotion. There is a little more steadiness, a little more space and, from time to time, a growing sense of openness.
The second book in this trilogy, Cultivating the Golden Moment, explores that journey in much greater depth. Together we examine how regular formal practice gradually develops the holding capacity that allows open awareness to emerge more naturally.
Within that spacious awareness, something occasionally happens that contemplative traditions have recognised for centuries. Without trying to force it or make it happen, moments sometimes arise in which life is experienced with an unusual sense of clarity, simplicity or connectedness. They cannot be manufactured and they rarely arrive on demand. In fact, they often seem to appear at precisely the moment we stop trying so hard to make them happen.
Within Mindful Representations, I refer to these experiences as the Golden Moment.
The next article explores what the Golden Moment is, why these experiences matter, and why they are best approached with curiosity and humility rather than the temptation to chase them.
Continue the Golden Moment trilogy
Deepen your understanding
- Mindful Presence in Complexity
- Wisdom Beyond False Certainty – A Sufi Story About Wisdom, Curiosity and Critical Thinking
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