Dear Friends, Family, Neighbors, and Those of You I Don’t Yet Know —
Welcome to tonight’s issue of Odd Company. With any luck, you’ve taken time to enjoy the Snow Moon — the second full moon of 2024, which was at its best two nights ago, but is still spectacular tonight, if your skies are clear enough to see it. Full moons are among my favorite natural wonders. There’s nothing finer than to be awakened by the magical light of a full moon washing across one’s face. It never gets old.
The cats like it, too, as do the coyotes. I’ve heard rumors of a pack of five coyotes roaming our neighborhood. So you can imagine my consternation when I called the cats for dinner and Nellie didn’t appear. The sun set. Twilight gathered. And finally darkness fell. Still no Nellie. Finally, with our own dinner finished and the dishes done, I retired to my studio to get to work. It’s warm in here. The room is small, but it has a heat vent all to itself. The west-facing wall is mostly windows and a door, so it gets direct sunlight half the day. And the other walls are lined with books, which make great insulation. The cats like to sleep in here at night because this room holds the heat longer than any other room of the house. Imagine my joy and surprise when I found the missing Nellie asleep behind my computer screen, next to the computer itself, which is always warm.1
We have a house guest at the moment — my stepmother. I think Nellie retired here to enjoy some alone time, which all of us need now and then (but especially cats). Still, she was happy enough to gobble her dinner once I brought it in here for her. Meanwhile, our other cat, Penny, must have thought I was crazy, out in the yard clinking a fork against the dinner bowl and calling plaintively.
Though it might seem as if tonight’s Odd Company is about cats, it’s really about how bad it is for us to think too much about ourselves. I’m not sure quite who taught me this, or when I learned it. But at some point in my life — probably during my childhood — someone pointed out to me that it’s somewhat rude to talk too much about yourself. “When you say the word ‘I,’ or ‘me,’ or ‘my,’ notice it.” That was the message. I suspect my grandmother mentioned it when she taught me how to write thank you letters. “A thank you letter is not about you. It’s about the person you’re thanking.” Not that one can never say “I.” Just that the word should be used judiciously. Later I learned that this idea can apply to any communication. The best friends are interested in the world outside themselves.
Given this training, imagine my discomfort when the rude trio — I, me, my — became one of the repeating themes of Silicon Valley. iPhones, iPads, iPods, me.com, MySpace, etc. Personal preferences. Personalized advertising. The whole idea of “We know what you like; we’ll turn your world into whatever suits you.” Probably it’s unsurprising that we’ve ended up with “my truth” and “your truth.”
There are a couple of basic principles I’ve come across over and over again in the search for wisdom and a better life. They both concern our relationships with other people, and the way we see ourselves. The first is humility. To get anywhere in this world, we must first understand that we don’t know everything. No human being who ever lived was always right and never wrong. Everyone makes mistakes; everyone has their failings, including you and me. Once we recognize our own imperfections, it gets a lot easier to be understanding about the imperfections of others. There are definitely people who are so messed up that they simply have to be stopped. But most people with whom we disagree are not so different from us.
Which brings us to the second basic principle. Which is to form the habit of curiosity. As we see from the first principle, anyone who thinks they know everything is just wrong. It’s a mistake to assume we already know everything there is to know about anything or anybody. We may need to remind ourselves that we still have plenty to learn. That’s humility, right? When we disagree with someone, why not ask them why they feel the way they do? They’ll have their reasons. In return, they might be open to hearing why you feel the way you do. We don’t have to agree, but we’ll be closer to understanding the person we disagree with. By remaining curious, we remain open to the mystery and wonder of the world around us. And that sense of wonder is a major source of joy.
Tonight’s music is “A Cooked Road,” written and performed by the American singer-songwriter Darrell Scott. Scott is mainly known for country music, but this song transcends genre. It is, in part, about how much better a song is when it’s sung for someone else.
And now, dear readers, so long until March.
Some of my readers are curious as to why I don’t simply keep my cats indoors. Life would certainly be simpler and lower stress in some ways if I did. Most of my life, I kept caged birds. I had parakeets and canaries because my mother did, and her mother before her. I enjoyed their songs and high jinks. I stopped keeping birds because it made me feel bad about myself. They were meant to fly, but I was keeping them from it. Same thing with cats. There are things they are meant to do that they can’t do indoors. Penny is quite happy to spend most of her time indoors. Nellie, on the other hand, is abjectly miserable indoors. So we let them both come and go as they wish. Yes, they are little assassins, in spite of their belled collars. They are both spayed, but otherwise they are doing what they’re meant to do. It’s Nature, writ large.
Thanks, as usual for your post and thoughts on the overemphasis of the first person. I believe there are several studies that have shown that high achievers, as a group, underestimate their skills and accomplishments, whereas others (I hesitate to call them under or low achievers) often overestimate their skills and accomplishments. Of course there are those among us who are high achievers and also arrogant braggarts, but their behavior probably masks an underlying insecurity of not measuring up. I have been intrigued with a Zen concept of nothing or emptiness, a concept that has had numerous interpretations over the centuries. One interpretation explains emptiness as a mode of perception in which one neither adds anything to nor takes anything away from what is present, noting simply, "There is this.” In a modern physical sense this is equivalent to the principle of conservation of energy/mass; that is the total amount of mass (or energy which in modern physics is the same thing as mass) in the universe is a constant. Another related interpretation states that not-self does not become apparent because it is concealed by "compactness" when one does not give attention to the various elements which make up the person. Compactness here meaning, I think, clinging to the concept of a circumscribed individual. Again a modern analogy: each of us, in a reductive sense, is nothing more than atoms, ions and molecules interacting, and in principle no different than any other set of chemical reactions occurring in the universe.