Act your shoe size, not your age…

When I was but a wee lad and dinosaurs still roamed the earth, one of the insults I would regularly trade with my peers was the classic, “act your age not your shoe size”. Which makes sense if you are eight years old and using UK shoe sizes, but probably doesn’t work so well if you are older or live elsewhere in the world… …Or does it?

For you see, somewhere between then and now, my reading list expanded to include a broader church than just Whizzer and Chips. And along the way I bumped into Zen Buddhism’s concept of Shoshin, or “the beginners mind”.

For those not familiar with Zen, Shoshin is in essence the ideal way that a beginner might approach a new topic: fully conscious of their lack of knowledge, but open minded and eager to learn. It’s a concept that lives in the same postcode as Proust’s “new eyes”, only several houses further along the street.

So armed with this new perspective, if we were to head back to the playground of my youth, the insult is gone and instead the words become a marshalling cry to see the world anew, without assumption and prejudice. Which is no bad thing.

What was the last insult you traded, that turned out (with thought) to be anything but?