If you're reasonably open to experience, intelligent, and good at pattern matching, you'll arrive at a "seen it all" plateau by about age 35-50. It won't be true, but it will feel like it. Genuine, category/pattern busting surprise is harder to find past a point in our universe
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But "beginner mind" idea is right in essence. Except you have to generate the surprise within yourself. Thanks to our enormous capacities for denial etc. some of the deepest reserves for mystery and surprise are within you. You just have to be willing to look foolish to tap them
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People dimly recognize this and try to pick up new skills and brave early-learning-curve awkwardness as a way to inject freshness into life again. That's not quite right. If you're an advanced pianist, fumbling at tennis won't really help rediscover the surprisability of age 9.
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What WILL help is to blow up things where you think you already know it all and find ways to go all fumbling and awkward again. So our notional pianist has to find a way to be a fumbling beginner *at the piano* again.
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Self-disruption basically. Trying to inject novelty into your life by learning unrelated new things is like trying to do 3 undergraduate degrees instead of 1 PhD. A series of degrees is a scripted series of self-disruptions. MS mind disrupts BS mind. PhD mind disrupts MS mind.
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Doesn't work very well, but the more informal, less scripted version of developing a sense for when you've plateaued in some activity and blowing it up at the right time, to make it new again, but WITHOUT losing the experience earned... that's the real skill of surprise-seeking
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Thank you for reading my long-winded justification for my writing mostly sucking this last year
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Addendum: there is a big element of surrender in accessing surprisal latent in the universe, and it becomes harder to surrender with age because we become addicted to agency. Even when risks are low, we resist. Kids surprise more easily because they surrender more easily.
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you just painted a bunch of "seen it all" all over the act of meditation in my mind
Thanks. Twitter will use this to make your timeline better. UndoUndo
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Done! We've saved this tweet to your Readwise library so that you can revisit/remember it

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