In Japan, April 1st is not just the first day of spring. It is the first day of the year.

The school year — 新学期, shingakki — begins in April, from kindergarten through university. Children starting elementary school attend their 入学式, nyūgakushiki, the entrance ceremony. University students walk into their first lecture halls. And on the same morning, fresh graduates across the country attend their 入社式, nyūshashiki — the ceremony marking their first day as company employees. The fiscal year, 年度, nendo, turns on April 1st too. Everything resets at once, across the whole country.

Which means every April 1st, Japan is simultaneously full of beginners. If you walk past an elementary school in the morning, you will see it — small children in new uniforms, ランドセル backpacks almost comically large for their size, parents beside them in suits or kimono, holding their hands. Everyone moving a little slowly, as if the moment deserves it.

And nearby, almost certainly, cherry blossoms are open or just beginning to fall. New things begin under falling petals. The beauty and the impermanence arrive together.

The city is full of people who do not know what they are doing yet, and are trying anyway.

初心

初心, shoshin, means beginner's mind. The first character, 初, means first or beginning. 心, kokoro, means heart or mind. Together: the heart of a beginner. The quality of approaching something as though for the first time — openly, without the accumulated assumptions of experience, with full attention because nothing yet feels automatic.

The concept is most associated with Zeami Motokiyo, the 14th century Noh playwright who articulated it in his treatises on performance. His phrase 初心忘るべからず — shoshin wasuru bekarazu — is usually translated as "do not forget the beginner's mind." But Zeami meant it on three levels.

The first is the beginner's mind of a novice — the openness of someone who has just started, who has no assumptions yet, who must pay full attention because nothing is automatic.

The second is the beginner's mind at each new stage — when you advance in any practice, you become a beginner again in a new context. The accomplished person who forgets this stagnates.

The third, and the one that stays with me, is the beginner's mind of old age. When the body declines and a Noh performer can no longer do what they once could, they must return to simplicity. That simplicity — earned through a lifetime of practice — is a different kind of 初心 than a student's ignorance. It contains everything that came before it, and has released the need to show it.

Zeami was writing for performers. But the three-stage reading travels well beyond the stage.

What April 1st holds

I think about 初心 every year when April comes. Not because I am beginning something new — though sometimes that is also true — but because the city around me is full of people who are. The child walking to their first day of school does not know yet what school will be for them. The new employee in the too-stiff suit does not know yet what this company will ask of them, or what they will become inside it. They are all, for this one morning, completely open.

There is something worth borrowing from that, even when you are not the one beginning.

The cherry blossoms fall on the first day and the hundredth day alike. The season does not distinguish between the beginner and the expert. It simply blooms, briefly, and asks you to notice.

A practice

初心 is not only a philosophical concept. It is a practical one. In any skill — cooking, making, writing, maintaining a home — there are things you stopped noticing because you have done them so many times. The attention that was full at the beginning has become partial. The care that was deliberate has become habit.

Returning to 初心 means occasionally doing something you know well as though you are learning it again. Washing a bowl. Sweeping a floor. Making tea. Not faster, not more efficiently — but with the quality of attention you brought when you first learned how.

Not every day. But sometimes. On a first of April, perhaps, when the city is full of beginners and the cherry blossoms are falling on all of them equally, it is a good time to remember what that felt like.