Starting A New Year With Beginner’s Mind

The summer I turned 20, I enrolled in a German language program in Salzburg Austria and went to Europe for the first time. It was a trip that would launch me on a half-century of travel and long sojourns in foreign countries.

Within hours of my arrival in Salzburg, I met a classmate who had a Eurail pass like me. We had little else in common; she was a striking blond and only daughter of a wealthy California cardiologist while I had mousy brown hair and was one of seven from a middle-class Maryland family. We became fast friends anyway.

Beth and I traveled everywhere together on our Eurail passes, riding overnight trains to Lucerne, Lugano, Florence, Venice, Munich, Cologne and Budapest when we didn’t have classes. Yet it was in the cobbled streets of Salzburg where we thrived, taking afternoon walks in Mirabel Gardens, sampling pastries in old town cafes, and venturing out for nightlife in thrumming pubs. We learned enough German to converse with locals and with the Austrian “families” where we boarded (i.e. elderly widows who took in students).

The hardest part about that summer was saying goodbye to Salzburg and to each other at the end of it. Beth coined the term “Goodbye Eyes” when we had a last apple strudel in our favorite café or a final round of shandies at a local pub; the one where patrons broke into song as the evening wore on. Viewing things through Goodbye Eyes was our way of being fully present and committing these last acts to memory, imbuing them with nostalgia.

Beth and I spent another idyllic summer together the following year after graduating from college. She arranged for us to waitress in her cousin’s Denver restaurant before we would start full-time jobs in the fall. On our days off, we hiked in the Rocky Mountains and explored western towns like Cheyenne and Taos. I rode shotgun in Beth’s Malibu convertible on long road trips, which heightened the sense of adventure that summer.

At the end of it, we returned to separate lives on opposite sides of our big country. We wrote letters to each other for a decade, and then she got married and a few years later so did I. We lost touch when my husband’s job took us to west Africa in the early 1990s. I did freelance writing while raising two children in a challenging country. With no internet, smart phones or Facebook, it was hard to keep up with—or find—old friends.

After moving back to the US, I happened to be in Colorado on a family trip when I had an impulse to look for Beth. Recalling that her cousin also owned a restaurant in Boulder, I dropped in to see if someone might know her whereabouts. As luck would have it, her cousin was there and she recognized me immediately even though we were both thirty years older. When I asked if she knew where Beth was living, she looked at me oddly.

“She isn’t,” the cousin blurted. “Beth is dead.” Without giving me time to take it in, she went on, “She died of brain cancer a few years ago. She tried to reach you before she passed, but she couldn’t find your address.”

I left the restaurant in shock that day, and it was months before I could think about Beth without crying.

Since that rude awakening, I’ve sometimes wondered if Beth had looked at life with Goodbye Eyes because she knew she didn’t have much time. She barely made it to fifty, and she left her husband and three children behind.

Fifty years after that summer in Salzburg, I’m an older, wiser woman who no longer looks for differences instead of commonalities when I meet someone; nor do I view people and events through Goodbye Eyes to commit them to memory and imbue them with nostalgia. Goodbye Eyes sounds too foreboding to me now, even though it did make us pay attention in a novel way when we were younger.

In the coming year, I’m opting to view people and events with Beginner’s Mind, although I know it’s become a cliché. I hope to be fully present in each moment without preconceived notions about how people or things should be. Beginner’s Mind leaves no room for judgments, or for wistful longing for the past and trying to hold on to people and places too long. Instead I want to be open and let people—and the natural world—surprise me with the unforeseen.

Touring with “Circling Home”