“Buddhists speak of learning to see the world with “beginner’s mind,” and that’s precisely what you have to do every semester: begin again, from scratch, knowing that anything can happen — seeing those ten, or fifty, or even five hundred students, like the two thousand students you’ve seen before, with beginner’s mind. Our anxiety dreams, surely, are the index of our secret fears of failure and inadequacy. But they’re also the measure of how very difficult it is — and how very exhilarating — to begin each semester with beginner’s mind.”