I've forgotten how it feels to be new

I’m in my first ever improv class at age forty-six and my teacher said something that got me thinking: “I’ve forgotten what it’s like to be new.” He was explaining why teaching was harder than performing. “I have this wealth of experience that I want to share, and I just want to funnel it all into you. But that’s not how learning works.”

He introduced us to his stop word, a specific phrase we should use when we didn’t understand something. Something that would snap him out of expert mode and back into beginner’s mind.

The idea of stop words has been stuck in my head all week. Thinking about conversations where I’m the experienced one. When I feel myself jumping ahead, assuming knowledge that isn’t there, skipping steps that have become invisible to me.

In my thirties I decided to take up dancing and signed up for the laidback hip-hop class called “Mondays Groove”, thinking my dance background would carry me. I’d spent seven years learning Latin and ballroom as a kid, from eight to fifteen. Countless cha cha’s and waltzes. I knew how to move to music.

Except I didn’t. Standing in that circle while the instructor demonstrated a simple hip hop sequence, my feet felt like lead weights attached to someone else’s body. The rhythm that should have been automatic wasn’t there. The groove everyone else seemed to find effortlessly had abandoned me completely.

“Mondays Groove” might be my stop word. That moment of standing still while everyone else moved, of realizing that being new isn’t something you remember. It’s something you have to experience again.

I haven’t given anyone that phrase to use when I’m racing ahead in explanations. But I’m thinking about it. About finding my way back to the beginner’s mind I’ve forgotten.

Maybe that’s what stop words are really for. Not just to pause and clarify, but to pause and remember. To snap us out of expert mode and back into the humbling, valuable discomfort of not knowing.