Today I have a grab bag of thoughts and observations. I hope there is something here that can resonate with you.
Recently I found out about an interesting character from Greek mythology whose name is Procrustes. He is best known for hosting guests in a bed that was literally “one size fits all.” This was possible because Procrustes would cut off the legs of tall people so that they could fit the bed. He stretched short people with his hammer (he was a smith) so as to make them fit, too. What a perfect metaphor for the way we all tend to think! Unhappy with what we observe or discover, we “trim it” or expand it so that it fits our neatly held theory about life.
I taught high school English for 26 years and during that time I encountered some funny situations. One of them was when I was standing in the classroom, in front of a row of desks. A student sat in the second desk in the same row, with his feet up on the back of the chair of the first desk. Unwittingly, while I was talking to the class, he let his legs go and pushed the first desk in the row forward, right into my groin area. It did not hurt but the class gasped in horror. I simply stopped my lecture and pointed out that now “I would have to adopt if I wanted kids of my own….”
Another situation occurred in the classroom while we were studying a short story with a romantic couple in it. As we discussed the couple’s motivation, I deliberately asked the kids to imagine their grandparents making out in the back seat of a car. You could hear a pin drop in the classroom. And the look of nausea and total abhorrence on the students’ faces was absolutely unforgettable. What fun to mess with the kids!
Our culture decrees that we learn to act in an acceptable manner. From the outside in, we are coerced to believe and act in a specific way. Eventually, our parents hope, we internalize the standard and we act out the prescribed behaviours naturally. As philosopher Alan Watts points out, we are all “genuine fakes.” But as we get older, we long to be authentic and begin to strip away everything that is not really us. For many of us this process only stops when we go to the grave.
How long would it take for us to become superstitious? Most of us claim freedom from such a world view but how many bad things would need to happen in our lives before we changed our minds? And what if a number of good things happened to us in rapid succession? If in one day we met the love of our lives, got a dream job and won a lottery, would we be tempted to credit some previously unacknowledged entity for our good fortune?
Humans have long envied the freedom from responsibility that the animals around us seem to enjoy. In particular, birds who can soar in the sky appear to have total freedom from the cares that weigh us down. Our developed consciousness is to blame, apparently. We see and think and feel more than the animals do. But there is a price for it: we spend much of our lives learning just to be. Animals cover that lesson in the first few minutes of life.
Many people confuse the concept of irony and coincidence. Irony can be defined as something occurring that is the opposite of what was expected. Coincidence can be described as the simultaneous occurrence of events that are connected in some way. It is ironic to win a lottery if the expectation was that it would never happen. But it is mere coincidence that I happen to enjoy ice cream in my sixties more than I ever did when I was a child.
And finally, it is really true. Wisdom accompanies those whose lives are checkered with all kinds of failures. Embracing failure because it imparts wisdom is, therefore, the intelligent thing to do. It’s just that our egos are wired for a different experience.