Dear Friends, Family, Neighbors, and Those of You I Don’t Yet Know —
It’s been a busy and interesting couple of weeks here at Odd Company world headquarters. We had the holidays, of course. Our son and his wife flew out from their home on the East Coast in the midst of the storm that caused the cancellation of over 5,000 flights nationwide. That was quite a nail-biter. But what fun it was to have them with us for a week once they got here! Many a cookie and many a piece of fudge were eaten. I won’t say by whom. Mum’s the word. One of John’s brothers had been sick for some time, and on Christmas Eve, he left this world — for a better one, no doubt. His mother once told me it’s no wonder he drove race cars and made benthic dives, as she could feel him doing cartwheels and somersaults in utero, a measure of his energy and zest for life. Then there was the heavy rain we had on New Year’s Eve. The bad news is I knew it was dumb to store boxes of books on the floor in the basement. And there’s more rain on the way — as much as two weeks of it. There will be floods and landslides in these parts; it’s pretty much a given. The good news is that after the storm is over, the drought will be, too. Feast or famine! O brave new world that has such weather in it.
All this rain has brought to mind a favorite song of mine, “Act of Nature,” by the American folk singer-songwriter Cheryl Wheeler. Wheeler is often described as having a “cult following,” which I suppose is a polite way of saying she doesn’t have a bunch of platinum records on her mantle-piece. Nevertheless, her work is wonderful. This particular song is about the irresistible power of storms and emotions. You’ll find the lyrics posted on Wheeler’s website.
Not long ago, my sister sent me a link to a piece by the New York Times columnist, David Brooks. He has an interesting mind, and I usually enjoy reading his work, but this was one I hadn’t seen before. The headline is something about life hacks, a phrase that makes me tired just thinking about it. Hack. It’s not a nice word. It means a worn-out horse. In my own trade, it means someone who writes low-quality material solely for money. Here in Silicon Valley, “hacker” started out as a word for someone who breaks into a computer system and tampers with the code or information illegally, either for personal gain or just to cause trouble. So “life hack” is not a phrase I associate with anything good. This may have something to do with my age. Because, according to Brooks, the definition of life hack is actually “a bit of golden wisdom.” The column is a list of these bits of wisdom, taken mainly from the work of tech journalist Kevin Kelly. My favorite is this jewel:
“The thing that made you weird as a kid could make you great as an adult.”
I fully believe this. I suppose some of that belief comes from personal experience. I was a weird kid, though memorable, by most accounts. I spent a fair amount of time playing fantasy games in trees. I could most often be found alone in an out-of-the-way corner reading, writing, playing music, or drawing. My friends were other kids on the edges of things — members of the Thespians, members of the jazz band, math wizards, amateur taxidermists, animal shelter volunteers, kids who believed in the power of Ouija boards and dared each other to hang out in cemeteries after dark. I went to my senior prom with a group of other girls in the days before that was a thing. When we had to choreograph a modern dance for gym class, I convinced a group of pals to use Edvard Grieg’s “Hall of the Mountain King” for the music. That was *some* dance.
Sometimes I wished I were more normal. It can be lonely out on the edges of things. But the normal kids all seemed to be having normal fun, and it didn’t actually look all that interesting to me. Plus I had no idea how to be normal. So I went along my eccentric parallel path, occasionally feeling like an alien anthropologist on a strange planet. The older I got, the more I learned about how to fit in and get along. There have always been and will always be things about me that surprise others when they find out about them. But what it all seems to boil down to is this: weirdness is just an outward sign of courage and curiosity so powerful that no amount of peer pressure can overcome it.
For the past week or two, I’ve been reading the part of Robert Sapolsky’s Behave that deals with conformity and obedience to authority. Because we are such a social species, pressure to fit in — to do what everyone else is doing — can be enormous. Getting along in our social milieu is vital. We can’t survive without remaining in the good graces of our fellow humans to at least some degree. Being a “team player” is generally considered good. This is how wars and war crimes happen, of course. Under the right circumstances, even the most normal of us is capable of participating in acts of savagery. We have all sorts of ways to make ourselves feel okay about it. “I was just following orders.” “Everyone else was doing it.” As Sapolsky says, “When we discover we are out of step with everyone else, our amygdalae spasm with anxiety, our memories are revised, and our sensory-processing regions are even pressured to experience what is not true. All to fit in.”
We’ve seen this human tendency in action during the pandemic. Anxiety made most of us happy to do whatever our leaders told us to, even though the messages changed from day to day and were often inconsistent in spite of being presented as the obvious truth. The voices of those who remained curious and courageous — the weird ones who questioned and resisted — were systematically silenced, often quite brutally. Now that we’re no longer so terrified, those voices and their questions are bubbling out into open discussion, and we’re becoming more able to see the real complexity of the situation, and the unexpected effects of some of the decisions we made as a society. We didn’t always do the best thing. I think we’ll find that we should have listened to some of those “weird” people.
It all comes back to basic humility. Those who are out of step might or might not be wrong. Following blindly and without question is always riskier than it feels, because as we know, groups can be as wrong as individuals. Anyone can be mistaken. As members of a democracy, it’s our job to consider and discuss all the information we can find and make our own reasonable decisions about what to believe and what not to believe. It is *not* our job to keep others from hearing messages we disagree with.
And now, to bed. Tomorrow will be a busy day. I need to get those books into plastic bins, and pick enough lemons to keep the branches from breaking when the next storm arrives on Wednesday. Till next time, I wish you the snugness of good shelter and good luck.