Over the past few weeks I’ve been helping a good friend
with her mid-life crisis. Though she’s nowhere close to middle age, and even if
she were it would be on the lower side. How do we get to these perceived crisis
points? On a very strong personal scale I empathize with her. I spent a lot of years
in the same place she is. Wallowing in those deep pools of doubt and
self-challenge, trying to find the road we need to walk in order to get to
where we need to go, or want to be. The much sought after adventurous road that
is really about whimsy, serendipity, and wonder.
I managed to find my road, but not until I exhausted
myself with long nights of journal writing on failure, self-loathing, and
doubt. And the occasional night staring into the darkness and city lights with
only Miles Davis, Etta James, and Charley Parker keeping me company while I
pondered why I appeared to be lost in my life. To paraphrase an old Orson
Welles commercial, “We will stop no whine before it’s time!”
The opening salvo of what whimsy can be came to me while
reading a foreign correspondent’s autobiography. He said that when he was stuck
for a story he would “head down the road, turn left, and then turn left again,
and that would be where the story was”. Over time I started to think about what
that could imply in a day to day life?
So I adopted the idea for my travel world, and it
worked. In New Orleans I walked up Bourbon to Canal, turned left and then left
again, and onto the wonders of Royal Street. I hadn’t done much research for
that trip, so I had no idea Royal Street existed. It worked for me in Oregon,
on Mt Hebo. I stopped to take a picture of a State Park sign to show someone I’d
been in the same place she had the week before. On a whim I turned left up the park
road, and left again on the mountain road and came out on top of a brilliant
plateau that gave me stunning views, and an unintentional but welcome reminder
of my late father. I couldn’t invoke whimsy in my “work a day” world because my
time and assignments weren’t my own.
I became a fan of whimsy, and soon enough along came
serendipity. That wonderful and occasionally frustrating happenstance where
what was initially a problem becomes the inertial catalyst for new and wondrous
discoveries. The kind of problems that derailed dates, work solutions, slow
Sunday’s in bed with the New York Times, airline reservations, cooking dinner,
job applications, hotel bookings, dates, and I think you’re getting the idea.
Yes, the dating thing was mentioned twice. In each of these cases my original
reaction was wide ranging from outright anger, blood curdling frustration, and soul
crushing disbelief. I had yet to accept that the Universe had other plans for
the “immediate me”, and I had also yet to learn that overall I wasn’t in total
control of the driver’s seat.
All of these things are part of my friend’s crisis. I
feel quite badly, and I do mean incredibly badly, that I can’t help her through
this other than being supportive of whatever choices she makes. She has to have
her own dark nights, hair pulling frustrations, and to live through those
negative experiences that eventually open our eyes to the realization that we
spend more time on our perceived adversities than we do on our strengths and
inner peace.
At this same time I am reading a book by Susan Cain
called “Quiet, The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking”.
Turns out it’s really quite normal to want to explore thoughts and ideas in
solitude. In the book she demonstrates how badly we treat those who do not
participate well in group activities, and how truly dangerous it can be to
force people into extroversion. As she explains in the book the Culture of
Personality has eclipsed the Culture of Character. The resulting stampede to
include everyone in all activities all the time is robbing us of the talents of
those who prefer individual thought. One of the great things she says in the
book is, ”… if you’re in the backyard sitting under a tree while everyone else
is clinking glasses on the patio, you’re more likely to have an apple fall on
your head.” Apparently Sir Isaac Newton was an introvert.
So is Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak. Turns out the
first Apple computers were not designed by a committee, but by an introvert sitting
alone in a separated workspace with walls and doors. Take that you New
Groupthink “open space concept” championing real estate sales wonks! Turns out
those “open space concepts” have scientific evidence to back up how they actually
lower productivity and negatively affect collaborative efforts, and have been doing
since the 1960’s.
In my recent travels and my new work-a-day world I
spend a lot of time alone. Mostly I prefer it. As anyone who knows me will tell
you, I spend a lot of time alone. Long periods, or sometimes not so long
periods, of spending time with people tire me out and make me cranky. It’s not
that I don’t like people, I love spending time with most people, but I also
need a lot of time to myself. Turns out it’s partly genetic, partly
environmental, and partly preference. Or as Ms. Cain discovers in an interview
with eminent developmental psychologist Jerome Kagan when he exclaims, “Every behaviour
has more than one cause.”
When I travel I try to keep my mind open, seeing new
things, hearing new sounds, tasting new foods, breathing new air (though
sometimes the smell of wide open “country” can smell an awful lot like the
inside of a closed up barn), and generally exposing myself to ideas, places and
adventures that challenge and expose me to a whole bunch of “new”.
In July of 2012 I spent a solitary weekend in Seattle.
On a soft Sunday morning I was waiting for the Chihuly Garden and Glass Exhibit
to open at the Seattle Centre. Had someone been there with me I could not have fully
seen and heard the following:
I pick
up a sweetened Venti Passion Iced Tea from the Starbucks in the courtyard
outside the Seattle Center Armoury. It’s warming up just nicely for an early
July morning and I want to stay hydrated while I wait for the Chihuly Garden
and Glass exhibit to open. I’m looking forward to experiencing glass art. I’ve
only seen one Chihuly piece in real life, the one that became a public art
amenity outside a high rise apartment building at home.
I
sit on a metal bench that wraps itself around a maple tree standing next to an
expansive lawn that stretches all the way over to the Pacific Science Center. In
the middle distance there’s the homeless guy I saw yesterday, but today he’s
not adjusting his private bits in front of children. Today he’s on the grass, sleeping
in the sun.
I
sit and sip though the straw, feeling really good with the summer air on my
face and skin, all while breathing deeply the oxygen richness of the Pacific
Coast. The contrasting shades of green on the trees and the well-kept lawn frame
an idyllic context of quiet and comfort. One of my favourite live/life things
is to stop, listen, and see. It is an indulgent passion for me, one that
celebrates my love for detail and my curiosity of people and the multitude ways
they present themselves to the world.
Moms
are wrangling kids and dads are pushing strollers, all with smiles and looks of
mild confusion. They are outside their well-known and familiar, but still
comfortable with minds actively engaged on so many disparate challenges at the
same time, so as to seem in a low level state of mental disarray.
An
older couple sit on a bench behind and across the asphalt path from me. Sitting
quietly together and separately, wearing summer weight clothes, reading the
Sunday paper. The obvious comfort and trust they get from each other, even in
their mutual silence is a palpable thing, heartwarming and inspiring. The chef guy
on his break from a nearby café using his wooden drumsticks on anything
he can find – not so much.
A
Cessna floatplane does a low flyby with the logo of a local TV program, Evening
Magazine on its side while a nearby carillon plays an unfamiliar tune. The guy
from Dante’s Dog Cart lies down on his back, on the hot asphalt, to frame a group
shot for a tourist family with the Space Needle looming behind them. The family
is from Atlanta. They’re all laughing and grateful for the hot dog guy’s
sacrifice on such a warm day.
A
foursome speaking German come up the path from the parking lot, one man with a
Seattle Center tourist map in his hand, one with his smartphone held out in
front of him. Both point in significantly different directions paying no
attention to each other, but both are singularly convinced that the King Tut
exhibit is “that way”. They’re both wrong, and the two women of the group just
grin at each other behind the men’s back.
Were I not a person given over to reflection of both
self and circumstance, I would have missed all of this. Had someone been with
me there would have been a distracting element of involvement and obligation. I
would have missed these five minutes spent in the light and sounds of everyday people
in motion. Instead of snapshots taken over a five minute window, I saw the
whole movie playing out as one complete story of context and substance.
I was personally irrelevant to the whole scene, but I
was the sole witness and therefore the storyteller. I could not have become
that storyteller without those many nights of journal writing, pondering, and
self-examination. An extrovert would never have been able to understand my
process or the path that led me to see the whole of the experience. I suspect
that an extrovert would be frightened of any time spent on introspection. I
personally doubt they would have seen much of anything I just described.
I no longer spend late nights with my journals, they’re
in storage. Only occasionally do I spend a night staring at the city lights
drinking gin with soda, and when I do it’s to figure out a plot hiccup,
dialogue problem, or a personal issue that needs pondering. I still listen to
Miles Davis, Etta James, and Charley Parker, and like all the music in my life it
continues to inspire me. I spend a lot of virtual time with my friend even
though she lives quite far away. Technology allows me to metaphorically hold
her hand on those dark nights when she needs one, and to send her a virtual hug
when she needs one of those, or sometimes when I need to kick her butt into
getting some sunshine in her life.
And where does the whimsy and serendipity come into
this? What if I hadn’t bought that journalist’s autobiography that I found on
the remainder pile? Without his words I would never have been introduced to the
idea that a good story is sometimes “down the road, turn left, and left again”,
thus encouraging me to take a different look at travel and storytelling. What
if I hadn’t seen a TED Talk video with Susan Cain, on an internet link sent to
me out of the blue by a friend? Then having that same video inspire me to read
her book about the power of introversion? What if, while on a road trip in
Oregon, I hadn’t indulged whimsy to take a ride to someplace unknown? I would
have missed the serendipity of a stunning mountain vista where I shared a
private moment with good memories of my late father. All of these proving to me
that whimsy and serendipity exist in my life, and where I hope they will firmly
remain.
Finally, introverts like Bill Gates and Steve Wozniak
and all their introverted colleagues, who indulged their own kind of “what if?”
whimsy, and created technologies that made worldwide communication easy and
cheap. With their creations, and me on my own continuing journey, my friend’s
dark nights aren’t quite as dark. She still has to see them through because
that’s what we as humans need to do, before we find a reason that we don’t have
to. But at least she knows she’s not alone on her road to discovering whimsy, and
serendipity. After all it was serendipity and whimsy that let our paths cross
in the first place, but that’s another story altogether.
“Quiet, The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t
Stop Talking” by Susan Cain is published by Broadway books, a division of Random
House, and is widely available in bookstores, online, and as an e-book in
various formats.
Please note that Ms. Cain does not advocate that
introverts are “better” than extroverts, only that introversion should be
considered the equal of extroversion. I recommend the book to everyone.
