Small Is All

Odd Company -- April 21, 2025

Dear Friends, Family, Neighbors, and Those of You I Don’t Yet Know —

A month has passed since the official beginning of spring. I started seeds indoors about halfway through March with two things in mind. First, in past years, it has taken about six weeks for my indoor babies to be big and tough enough to brave the world outside. And second, we can’t safely plant the vegetable garden here till the end of April. Not because of frost danger. It rarely freezes here even in the depths of winter. Rather, we wait because both night-time temperatures and the temperature of the soil itself should be in the 50’s or higher before planting. We can plant sooner, and in fact, I’ve done that sometimes in the past. But then I’ve often found myself putting up makeshift shelters for the peppers and tomatoes, because there might still be storms and wind. And about the only thing that actually grows when temperatures are below 50 are the brassicas — cabbage, broccoli, and kale to name three. (Which might be why so many of my Danish great-grandmother’s recipes involve cabbage and kale.)

So, I started seeds expecting my plants to be ready for the garden at the end of April. But this is the first year I’ve used grow lights, and I failed to take them into consideration. D’oh! My plants are ready now. In fact, they were ready last week. Who knew such a smallish change could make such a big difference? Yesterday found me in the yard sticking my fancy schmancy bread thermometer into the dirt here and there to get some sense of how warm the soil is. 49 degrees! Close enough. Welcome to the late April 2025 issue of Odd Company, in which we consider how the small things we do can make big differences.

You will think I’m going off on one of my patented tangents now, and yes, I am, but I promise I’ll bring things back to the subject at hand. Lately, I’ve been reading When We Cease to Understand the World, by the Dutch writer, Benjamín Labatut. This book is one of those tricky hybrid fiction-nonfiction works. It’s hard to know how accurate it is. In this case, it’s fictionalized, brief biographies of four men with highly unusual minds: Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Werner Heisenberg, and Erwin Schrödinger. Haber was a chemist (and the inventor of Zyklon-D, the pesticide the Germans used for gassing millions of Jews during WWII). Grothendieck was a mathematician. Heisenberg and Schrödinger were the theoretical physicists who developed quantum mechanics and many related fields that completely changed the way we view the workings of the natural world. All four men were tortured souls to one degree or another, who seemed to periodically forget that they needed to sleep, eat, and bathe, and sometimes spent long periods alone, with only their calculations for company. All of them had the experience at least once of “waking up” to find a stunning result in the notes before them, unable to recall how they had reached it. Sometimes it would be the labor of many days to work backward from the answer to the question. All of them felt that they sometimes took leave of their senses, or descended into madness. Heisenberg, particularly, was horrified by what he had discovered — not an orderly world clarified by his discoveries; rather an impossibly chaotic one in which observations changed measurements, light could be both waves and particles, many versions of a world could exist at once, and the universe was pocked with black holes.

Perhaps this is what happens when an ultra-rational mind encounters the true complexity of everything. Faced with a universe so intricate and tangled that no human being can ever fully comprehend it, we back away into a smaller world that we *can* comprehend, or we go crazy. Or we conclude Somebody with a much bigger mind than our own must be behind it all.

What does all this have to do with small actions making a big difference? Not a huge lot. Mainly, I want to point out that in a world that is too complex to understand (that is to say, the world in which we live), we have no way to be certain how our actions will produce any particular result. Our “very stable genius” President is learning that lesson as I type this. We may think we know what will happen if we do X. But in reality, we are incapable of fully imagining all the possible results of our actions.

I confess I’m falling asleep at the keyboard now. It’s been a busy week and it’s late. But I want to conclude by pointing out that whatever we do seems to beget more of the same. If we are rude and self-serving, those who have been the object of our rudeness and self-service tend to dish it out in return, and the world becomes a little worse. If we are courageous, our courage gives courage to others, and the world becomes a slightly less frightening place. Because of this principle, we don’t have to do big, splashy things to make a difference. All we have to do is say hi to the barista, hold the door open for anyone who is struggling with it, be courteous in bad traffic, use the phrase “thank you” freely and often.

Personally, I’m out there with the Raging Grannies, jingling my tambourine and singing. I’m writing letters on paper, sent through the U.S. Mail, to every senator who has shown any sign of bipartisan behavior. I’m praying. And I definitely plan to do that smallest and most hope-inducing of all things. Vote.

Since we are speaking of the weird and unexpected tonight, it seems a perfect occasion to bring out the handpans. The handpan is a relatively new musical instrument descended from the steel drums one hears on many a street corner in Trinidad and Tobago. There’s quite a bit of handpan music out there, but for our purposes here, I’ve chosen ten-year-old handpan prodigy Sunni Holder, who lives in Queensland on the northern coast of Australia. Listen to this for a few minutes, and you’ll see how one child with a joyful heart can change everything.

I have the perfect poem for tonight, but I’ve entered it in a contest, and if I publish it, it’s disqualified. So we’ll have Sunni’s music instead, and as you see, it more than suffices. Till next time, let’s all engage in a few random acts of senseless kindness. It might change some hearts and minds!