I Like Trees

The most common question I get isn’t, “What do you think,” or “What do Humanists believe?” It’s, “Why do you cover your hair?”

Let me make one thing clear: It’s not something Humanists are required to do. It’s not something anyone is required to do. So it’s an individual thing, it’s my thing. Let me explain it to you, because I really do feel that it matters.
Imagine that you woke up tomorrow, and were suddenly enough. Really enough, enough for everything. You were suddenly beautiful, beautiful enough, so beautiful that you never had to feel threatened by anyone’s beauty, ever again. Imagine that you were so lovely that no makeup, no earrings, no anything could ever make you prettier or more beautiful You were so strong, and whole, that nothing could ever make you more of a handsome, strong, perfect man.
Imagine that suddenly, you never had to diet again, lift weights again, worry about what fits or how you look. Everyone in the world suddenly recognised that you were beautiful and perfect, exactly as presented, and no one could ever ask for more.
In the midst of that plenty, you shine, radiant, and everyone sees it. No one expects you to compete, because why would you need to compete? You’re enough. Everyone you see is also beautiful, and it’s nice that women dress up, it’s nice that men dress up, it’s lovely to see them and you hope it makes them happy. You’re happy, because you’re enough.

That’s today. Believe it or not, that’s today.

I cover my hair because I am enough. Because it reminds me, every day, that I don’t have to play the game, compete for looks, for status, for anything. It reminds me, and everyone around me, that the game is optional, and that you are allowed to have some of you that you don’t put on display. You’re allowed to have a part of your person and personality that you reserve just for you, just for private, just for secret. You’re allowed to take the beautiful hair you have, or the bald scalp, or the thinning and grey, and set it aside just for yourself and the few people near enough to see you in your sleepwear. You don’t have to empty the whole toy box out for strangers to be beautiful enough. I don’t have to share my beautiful hair, because what I have, and what I am, is enough.

So I cover my hair. At work, I wear small covers, pinned to the back of my head. I make them myself- I’ll get some pics up soon. In the rest of my life, I wear little caps that I make, usually out of spare fabric from my clothes. I try to make thing that match my outfits; at work I wear prettier things, because work hasn’t really been as welcoming of my plain self as I’d like. In the rest of my life I wear my little caps and bonnets, sometimes old-fashioned bonnets, or white caps, but often it’s just perky little fabric caps with a strip of ribbon or something on them. And they cover my hair, and people compliment me all the time on them.

Maybe that’s the weirdest part. Taking myself out of the game visually- wearing something that makes it clear that I am playing by other rules- results in a lot of support and questions. People ask me directions on the street more easily. They smile at my much, much more. I’m not sure that I’m comfortable with the idea that people have, that if you belong to a creed and do things outwardly according to it, you must be better or purer or more righteous. That kind of bothers me. I benefit from it, but it bothers me just the same. That’s not why I do it. I’m not better, purer, or more holy. We all have issues. The Amish still deal with theft and child abuse and all the problems of the real world; Jewish women still have insecurities and troubles; just look at what’s happened in Utah. Religious orders don’t mean you’re better. Belonging and working hard at being more kind and generous might make you better… but wearing a cap doesn’t make me any more pure than you. It just makes me willing to be public about trying.
The real trying, like my hair, is in secret, in that space I don’t share. It is for all of us. That’s what it’s like. And maybe that’s really what it does for people- it lets them know that I’m trying. I have to admit to harbouring a secret appreciation for those in all kinds of religious orders. A lot of atheists hate them, but I’ve known many, and admire what they’ve given up and what they work for. I’m not ready for that myself, but I’m willing to take ONE step, and give up wearing my hair down in the world.

I can’t explain all that when people ask. People are uncomfortable asking; everyone’s so sensitive these days. People usually ask first if I’m Amish, because they can’t think of anyone else who wears bonnets or caps. Sometimes they ask if I’m Mennonite. They know I’m not muslim because it’s not the traditional headscarf, but I often have long conversations about it with Muslim women, because they understand. Sometimes people get embarrassed, and ask hesitantly if they can ask me about my hair covering. I smile and say yes. They ask if it’s religious.
I have to think carefully about this one. Is it religious if I do it for myself, not for a deity? Is Humanism a religion?
I usually say, “I do it because it’s nice to have something you don’t share with everybody.” That usually lets people know that I mean it, without bringing God into it. “I’m a Humanist,” I follow up with, “And I do this because it frees up a lot of my energy to focus on the things that really matter.”
It does. I don’t have to worry about looking good enough; I am enough. I don’t have to worry about being young enough, because I’m enough. I don’t have to compete. I don’t have to look like everyone else; they’re doing a fabulous job of that already. I don’t have to be more-more-more. I cover my hair because it’s a sign of my withdrawal from the treadmill, and it’s done me immense good.
I don’t expect you to. I don’t think it would work for everyone. If wearing what you wear makes you enough, do it and be happy. Stop worrying about being enough. You don’t need to compete, no one could possibly compete with you. Like the stars, you are whole in yourself. You are wealthy beyond belief, especially compared with the nothing that people own elsewhere in this world. You are loved more than you can imagine by people around you. You are enough, and you can live that way. Use the energy, that energy you used to use for keeping up, on something better. Get curious about the world, get curious about who you are when you stop keeping up. BE ENOUGH, because you are.
That’s what I keep under my cap, and I’ll remind you any time you need it.

 FUCK BUTTERFLIES.

 That’s what it said across the top of my friend R’s journal page.

We’re brought up on the legend of the butterfly. It’s an irresistible idea, really; that if we can just find ourselves, somewhere inside the hungry, crawling worm that we feel like in our everyday lives, the one we can’t stand being… if we could just find the blueprint for the better version, and transform by escaping for a little while, we could emerge as a beautiful, happy, winged truth, free from the survival toil, just loving and free. Existing to flit and to flirt until death.

Which, for butterflies, doesn’t actually take very long.

Most of us would still consider it a fair deal. A lifetime of crawling, for fifteen minutes in the sun. The idea that a person can eat, eat, eat, until it’s time to get our awareness into place- at which point we just drop everything and leave. Then we break free into the life of being loved like we want to be, without the horrific effort of learning to be enough, in ourselves, to live without that external sun.

It’s beautiful. It’s inspirational. It’s absolutely, utterly poisonous. It’s nonsense like the butterfly myth that sabotages our real lives, and threatens our real growth. Let’s be honest: most of us have absolutely no trouble finding ourselves. We know right where we are, that’s part of the problem. We know all about where we are. We look around and feel helpless, and the art of finding ourselves is something we love. It frees us from the much less glamourous job of putting up with ourselves, the much less interesting daily practice and choice that really creates change.

All of us would love to see Julia Roberts eating her way across Italy. She’s the ultimate butterfly story, ever since Pretty Woman, where she went from crawling unhappy (but carrying the blueprint for elegant) hooker to elegant girlfriend with future life free from financial or emotional want. She didn’t DO anything to create this change, except to rise to the occasion when the opportunity came for finding herself, once she was outside her normal environment. She became a butterfly, just like that. First the consuming everything in sight, then the withdrawal from her old world, then off to love and sunlight.

I don’t really expect much more from “Eat, Pray, Love.” The much less lovely work that creates real change is the awkward daily task of learning to live with ourselves, and with the world as it is. Not removing from it, not transforming ourselves drastically, but the work we’re already doing, the work of becoming and making and doing, right here. Not finding our beautiful, love-centered butterfly endings, but living with out crawling, hungry, daily selves. The selves that are not worms and which will, if we force them to become winged beauties that live on nothing but love, will die.

Breaking free from metaphors is hard. Putting down the books (yes, even this one) and coming to grips with being our real selves is even harder. Recognising that we have found ourselves, and that we may need to change ourselves in something even more important than “get me out of here” ways, is hard. Desperately, painfully hard. It involves practice, constant effort, real personality change through months and years of determined growth and behaviour change, and it only works on vacation if you were already doing the work before you left.

Most of us can’t just up and leave. Most of us have lives that have something of value in them, that we would rather not destroy. It’s not helpful to have the idea spread further that leaving it, withdrawing from it, is the way to improvement. That’s actually an elitist attitude that damages us- if only those who can offord retreats can get enlightenment, that rules out most single mothers right now. Enlightenment doesn’t come from retreat. Enlightenment comes from exposure and engagement.

Engagement, not the kind where your work is all you do, but where you accept that work is work, and hunger is hunger, and love is love. And love can’t substitute for self. It can’t substitute for growth. It can’t make you happy with yourself, or fill the emptiness inside, because that’s just a temporary stopgap. Really filling it doesn’t mean being loved, or loving one person, it means coming to know and love and work with the world you’re in. Getting strong enough to make choices that improve it, and feeling like you make a difference because you are able to make a difference.

Inspiration is just that: inspiration. It reminds us why we do what we do; it can’t substitute for doing it. “Eat, Pray, Love,” is great as a butterfly book, but it’s only enough as a mantra if you were already doing the “work, share, cope,” part of the project. Whatever you’re doing, it’s not about discovering, but also about practicing. If you have to choose between self-discovery and practicing self-regulation, always choose practicing. A little discovery can direct a lot of practicing- a lot of discovery can’t make up for missing even a little bit of the real work.

That’s what it comes down to, really. Practicing. Real personality change comes from effort over time, constantly returning to your commitment to bring your choices into line with who you want to be. The fast breakthroughs come from slowly-exercised determination and willpower. Real change, and real life, require real effort. Self-sufficiency and self-determination also don’t happen if all you focus on is yourself. You have to focus on your life, you actions, your world and your place in it. Not you compared to who you want to be, but also on what you’re doing right now where you could be making better choices. And then making them, which is hard.

I’m not against, “Eat, Pray, Love.” I think it’s a great reminder for people who might need it. It’s unfortunate, since it begins and ends with love affairs, relationships that are not nearly as important as a person’s real relationship with their true self. (If that’s just a love affair, you’re in more trouble than this little leaf can help you with.) It leaves out the real story, the hungry tough work on the ground.

As a butterfly story, it’s beautiful and charming. Just don’t mistake the metaphors for the real work to be done, or how to do it.

After all, even my friend admitted, at the bottom of her journal entry… “…i love butterflies. “

 It’s all right. So do we. Work, share, cope with the phenomenal effort of living. I can’t promise you the butterfly ending. Even if they don’t admit it, the butterflies don’t really get the advertised butterfly ending, either. What I can promise you is that the life you have will eventually be worth giving up the butterfly bullshit for, because it will be real, and real life is worth learning to live with. It’s slow, it’s tough, and it’s worth it.

I will work for the health and wholeness of our larger society so that we are free of the limitations which would impede that personal work.

                “Man up, Jamal!” I looked up. The subject of the order toddled by, clutching his juice bottle.

            I’ve never forgotten that command, or the tender age of its recipient. Both the force with which it was given, and the gender-age slant of it, caught my attention.

            Someone brought to my attention recently that they hate it when parents call their son, “little man.” A lot of ideas about this were raised, but the question remained: Is it wrong to call a child, “little man”?

            To determine right or wrong, we have to ask the base question: is it harmful?

            That’s a tougher one to answer, and we won’t arrive at an answer here and now. I’m not even going to try. I do want to address one of the points raised as we discussed it, which was that there is no cognate for females, and that’s part of the problem.

            “Little lady,” has been suggested. The problem with that, the problem with both of these labels, is that they are not two-way.

            We can settle this right now. Close your eyes, and think of a good man. The qualities of a good man, and what they are to you. Choose the top three.

            Now think, “Good woman.”

            If those same three qualities were not the first things you thought of- since you already had an example of them in a good man- there’s a separate and unequal going on that you’ve been suckered into.

            There’s a distinction, in “little man,” or “little woman,” (little “lady is an apposite of  ”little gentleman,” and not of “little man”) that doesn’t need to be there. Those are a problem. If you don’t believe me, here’s sentence A, with no irrelevant distinction:
“Would all students come up to the front to get your certificates?”

and sentence B, with an irrelevant distinction thrown in:

“Would all the black students and all the white students come up to the front to get your certificates?”

            Now, part of the problem is that “little man” is actually used for something when it’s said. It combines the baby with the idea of being a mature adult. Unfortunately for everyone who would like to stop being gender-biased in their speech, there’s really no adult word that suits. “Little adult,” doesn’t work. “Little person,” is me without my heels on, struggling to reach the kitchen cupboards. “Little engineer” only works if they’ve shown a pronounced interest in either trains or electronics.

            “Little buddy,” is almost invariably male. “Little miss,” is hideously gendered unless you’re referring to my aim, which is improving.

            “Little Darwinian,” is great, but decribes too much of how they got here.

            So what are we left with? The ridiculously inclusive, “little humanoid?”

            If we gave it up entirely, they’d be fine. Children are astonishingly good at placing themselves in contect by age, and even by gender, as they grow. I have proof…     

            They will not grow up confused, they will not grow up broken. The only thing that our gendered speech reveals to us is our own bias, and so now we come to the next question (you knew this would be the next question): what do we do about it?

            As for, “Man up,” I don’t even know where to start. No one says, “woman up.” No one says, “Hey, woman up! Get yourself together!” No one sits down with their child and says, “hey! Get your Sojourner Truth on!” (Now that I think of it, that’s an awesome slogan, though.) “Woman up,” just doesn’t exist, not because women are not tough or strong or up to the fight, but because the whole idea is a macho statement that bears little relation to the actual capabilities of human beings. “Woman up,” is still like telling someone to “passive support up!” The misperception of “woman” is something we have to fix, but not by producing yet another separate but equal phrase.

If no one told you before… hear it now- adding a division, like “girl” to a word like “power” only weakens it. Forget girl power. I want… POWER.

       Jamal, telling you to “man up” only gives you half your superpowers. You’ve been gypped, and I’m terribly sorry.

            Un-man up. Woman and man up. Human up. Wise up. Get your human going. Do anything, anything, but man up.  No, we can’t  always remember to be gender-unbiased everywhere, but where kids are involved, we can freaking try, right? We can make an effort. PARENT up, and let’s try.

            I do have a disclosure to make, one gender-reliant secret. I’ll be honest. There’s one person in my life who calls me little miss, and I let her. Only one. Does  it all the time and I won’t say no. That would be my baby sister, heading off to college as I type this. (Congratulations, sweetie! Break several legs!) “Sister,” not “sibling,” because she says so, and since she’s an adult, I don’t argue. I let her because it’s funny, and because I get to call her anything I want in return. (No, I won’t tell you what I call her.)

            And as for the “little man…” Jamal, wherever you are, I’m so sorry. Don’t man up. Kid up, toddler up, bibbitt up. Or better still, here; I’ll man up, with you, because I have no problem with the distinctions as long as I get to be on every team. We’ll all man up, woman up, monkey up, and everything else up, until it’s all so up that it’s even. I’m with you on it, and we’ll humanist up as much as we can. We can face it all all down together. But don’t just man up. It’s too far a jump in the wrong direction, and none of us need to go there.

“I believe that what we do next is what matters most, and recognize that every action, inaction, and breath of becoming is a choice. I will not interfere with the choices of others unless they are causing real harm.”

          I had a discussion with someone about whether the world is a current, dragging you on to destinations that you might choose between, but never pull against, or whether it is a bland, currentless ocean in which you can find your own way.

                Predestination versus free will. It never gets old. We’ll be having this debate forever. When I die, people will stand around and wonder whether I wrote so much bad poetry because of my madness, or whether I wrote it in spite of it. And no one will ever know, not really, not even me. All you’ll have is a heap of bad verse and the question of why the hell i wrote it, and that will be my last bad metaphor in awkward terms, my opus, my fabulous and most evocative work. One big stream of writing, that I’ve no further use for and you can’t imagine why it came to be. I say this completely without sarcasm, but with a lot of cackling glee.

                Look… you’re in this world, whether you want it or not. It will never be exactly what you wanted. It will never be what you dreamed. At some point, taking advantage of what’s here requires that you let go of the you-image that you’ve built in your head, and claiming the you that you can build in the world. This is a lot harder for some people, and I understand that. It’s a lot harder for me. You have to become real, and becoming real means accepting that what you’ve got is all you’ve got, and that what you do is up to you. It’s terrible and beautiful and dangerous. And real.

                It doesn’t matter which is true. Either we have no choices, or all we have is choice. It doesn’t matter. It’s probably more likely that each choice limits our further choices, but increases our power to maximise the results of the choice. Think on it this way… As kids, we have tons of choice, but very little result. We can play at astronauts all we want, but it would take twenty years of it to actually become one. Our choices are vast, but not yet influential (except that some of those little steps may start paths which become huge.)

        As adults, we don’t have as many things we could really choose to do (it may, realistically, not be physically possible for me to pass the medical exam to be an astronaut.) But the choices that I do have- the options that are currently workable for me- are spectacularly workable, because I’ve got more of me to apply to them. I have discovered a knack for writing bad poetry. As a child, I could do it, but it wouldn’t be a very clear, crisp, good example of it. As an adult, I can write really bad poetry, and apply all of myself to the work. Out of my limited paths of talents and abilities, I can get a heck of a lot farther in any of those directions than ever before. I can apply myself, and write some of the worst poetry ever written. And I can do it every day, because I have the attention span and the determination (and a vast, even slightly sadistic, indifference to popular opinion.)

                That’s really what happens in a life- the evolution of choices. The more you choose, the more you get out of your choices. What’s more, there is always the option of going back, as an adult, and taking one of the other choices that used to be sub-optimal. I wasn’t ready for school ten years ago, but I can choose to go back to school. It’s a small choice, it doesn’t change much… yet. It will. Eventually that tiny little shift will open many doors, as I continue to choose my way down the path.

                You cannot choose what life gives you. You can try to get it into context; you can change how you deal with it and you can choose what you do with it. Life is both a game of genetic and environmental chance, and the ultimate do-it-yourself kit. You are given a pile of stuff, a pile of predisposition and circumstances, and a wrench. Go to it, kid.

                To put this in a more biological sense, you have a genetic predisposition. That can’t be argued. Some have a predisposition to narcolepsy, for example. (Shout out to my fellow sleepers. Sorry, folks, you’ve got me in your corner.) Some have a predisposition to physical prowess. Some have a little bit of extra mental organisation and become chess geniuses. That’s the lotto that we’re born with.

                What people forget, what everyone forgets, is that genes are not destiny. Not in the long term sense, but not even in the now sense. Genes are turned on and off across your lifetime, and the things you do on a daily basis are what change them. For example, muscle building. You do a heavy workout. Your muscles have cells torn up. They send out a chemical message: get help or there’s trouble.

                Your body uses that message to signal the turn-on for building new cells. Those cells are bigger and stronger, using the alternate pattern contained in your genes. Over time, your body uses these genes over others. The same thing happens in diabetes prevention. You may have the predisposition, but there’s a lot you can do to keep from ever having the disease. You have daily choices, and they control what your body becomes.

                Oddly enough, it seems that even other people’s choices can determine your genes and change how you turn out.

We’ve known for a long time that early experience changes genes; what we know by that (but not how to use it, yet) is that if it can be changed, it can be changed again.

                We’re probably predestined to examine this question for the whole of our lives, but what we make of it, and what we use of it to make ourselves into, remains to be seen. Life is an ocean full of currents, and reefs, and irresistible forces. It is also full of us, and the combination between what we have and what we build is what we are. We are always capable of more, and we are always capable of choice. Sometimes the choices are terrible, but we always contain them. The moment lives in us, and we live in it, and the whole thing moves forward in one big wave, if we’re lucky.

                There is no safe bet in the Nature vs. Nurture debate, (which is only an offshoot of the Free Will and Predestination version) except to say that it will always be both, and that we don’t have full understanding or control over either. I have to come to the conclusion, as in Act 3 of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, by Tom Stoppard: “There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said—no…” We may never know when it was, but we can’t kick ourselves for not taking it, because that moment is always, always with us. We have always got the choice, no matter where the currents bring us.

We got into the discussion while sitting on a bench, my friend R. and I. She’s brilliant, a shining, happy, cheerful up-and-coming psych grad student with a heart of gold.We have good discussions.

She brought up the question of branding health foods with cartoon characters so that kids will prefer them, and whether it was right, and whether it should be regulated.

“Sure,” i said, surprising myself. “I mean, it’s programming. Of course it is. But we’re going to do it anyway, we’re already doing it, we’re built to do it. If we didn’t do it nothing would work. The least we can do is admit that we’re doing it, and be up front about it.”

Then I wondered to myself, how true is that? We started talking about how automatic our choices are. We DO program ourselves that way, with everything from education to marketing. As adults, we throw all kinds of compulsions at each other, all kinds of persuasions and coaxings and promises of perfect something, all the time. We can’t walk down the street without seeing an advertisement, a political message, or some other communication. This is what we do.

We agreed that this isn’t the real problem; the real problem is that we don’t know when it works on us, because most of the time, we have no idea what we’re doing anyway.

We don’t. I don’t know if you’ve ever read or watched The Tick. If you haven’t, that’s all right (but you’re missing out)… but if you have, you’ll know the quote, “Rational thought is a one trick pony. You only get one trick- rational thought!”

The problem isn’t that rational thought is a one-trick pony, it’s that we have just so much darned faith in its continuation of the trick, that we let the horse amble anyplace it pleases. We convince ourselves that we get through our days as rational beings, while the pony of our rational thought sidles its way around the hurdles we really needed it to help on.We buy, sell, act, react, meet and intermingle, trusting ourselves all the while to be mature, rational, thinking creatures.

We need to face the fact that humans are idiots. Seriously. Not in that sarcastic, bitter way that we all say it, and not in the “everyone but us,” sense, either. I am an idiot. I am prejudiced, biased, stubborn, emotionally charged, and make decisions based on criteria which i then point-blank deny. And i do it all the time. Not just a little, but every single day. The dangerous part, the really dangerous part, is that I have no idea that I’m doing it most of the time, and neither do you.

There’s no reason why we would. Why would we? Hundreds of millions of years of ancestors got by without tennis shoes and pre-cut carrot sticks. There’s no real advantage to being ahead of the curve, is there? All you have to be is bright enough to have babies, as far as evolution is concerned. There is no substantial evolutionary advantage to being honest and real and right and true. Genetics happen when you make it far enough to breed; everything you do after the age of sixteen helps substantiate the species, sure, but you aren’t really the necessary part. So all this keeping a job, understanding orbital paths, remembering to get the laundry out of the dryer? That’s fabulous, but not what we have the advantage for. And your one-trick pony, rational thought, is nibbling clover next to the lavender label on a body wash no cave man needs.

Even the best and brightest of us can come up clueless sometimes, and most of the time miss all kinds of forests in favour of counting the spots on a leaf. Doctors are subject to bias in favour of the hurdles they see every day; physicists look from the perspective of their own disciplines. Psychology is the same- we spend years of study, learning everything that we can, and then we take that learning into the field and miss most of the field.

We do it because we have to. None of us is qualified or capable of understanding everything at once. These fallacies are biological short cuts, tricks that our minds and bodies use to keep track of a big, chaotic word. We prefer the berries we’ve had before, because we know they won’t make us sick. Having met tigers, we always check behind the trees before settling down for the night. Our mother used this soap, and it reminds me of her. I had a friend in college who always used that perfume, i never liked it. I like my brother; you have similar characteristics, why don’t we talk?

We’re built for it. It’s designed to get us through the daily jungle with as little effort as possible. The more we add on top of that jungle, though, the more we’re going to have to pay attention to. Whether we want it to or not, the brain is still indexing, keeping track. Creating shortcuts. And we’ll never know what we’re missing.

There’s a fabulous, if rambling, multipart article about this in the New York Times, called, “The Agnosognosic’s Dilemma.” It begins with the true description of a bank robber who had used lemon juice on his face, thinking it made him invisible to cameras. A spectacular delusion, really, and he’d arrived at it by what he thought was a genuine scientific test: spraying his face and trying to take a picture with a polaroid camera.

Needless to day, it didn’t work, and stands as a reminder to us all that we have no idea how blindingly incompetent we are, because we don’t even have the tools to measure it.

So what do we do about it? (You knew I was going to ask that question.) The answer is an awkward one to admit. The answer is: get habits. Good habits. Get the habit of watching that pony, and forcing it over the hurdles. Get in the habit of looking at the whole picture regularly, and asking yourself what part of it you’re superimposing. Will it help? Not really. But the things you miss are less likely to be critical.

The answer is to practice, and to practice hard. Steven Pinker (I warned you his name would come up often, and so here we are) wrote a terrific op-ed for the same paper, called, “Mind over Mass Media.” In it, he says,

“Yes, the constant arrival of information packets can be distracting or addictive, especially to people with attention deficit disorder. But distraction is not a new phenomenon. The solution is not to bemoan technology but to develop strategies of self-control, as we do with every other temptation in life. Turn off e-mail or Twitter when you work, put away your Blackberry at dinner time, ask your spouse to call you to bed at a designated hour.

“And to encourage intellectual depth, don’t rail at PowerPoint or Google. It’s not as if habits of deep reflection, thorough research and rigorous reasoning ever came naturally to people. They must be acquired in special institutions, which we call universities, and maintained with constant upkeep, which we call analysis, criticism and debate. They are not granted by propping a heavy encyclopedia on your lap, nor are they taken away by efficient access to information on the Internet.”

The trick is to keep your eye on the horse. It’s hard, but it’s how to miss fewer jumps, get more of what’s going on, and figure out a little more about what we don’t know we don’t know. Socrates said it himself, “The only true wisdom is in knowing you know nothing.” Is it awkward to still be discovering that, today? No. Our best hope is that everyone, at some point in their life, discovers it again.

 

           “Each of us is whole, unique, and possessed of limitless potential, and our own quirks and limitations, responsible for the choices we make and the people we become.”

            How legible is your handwriting?

            Mine’s awful. And in admitting that, I am admitting that I’ve had thirty-three years on this earth, about twenty-eight of which I’ve been able to write, and that I haven’t put in the effort to make it truly great. It’s so small a thing that it escapes public notice most of the time, so I don’t improve it. Somehow, we’ve lost the will, as a society, to sit down in private and work on becoming better, through the normal things that we do.

            Maybe we’ve lost sight of the fact that the things we do are what create us; I’m not sure.  We’re responsible for who we become. I was talking with Tom last night. You’ll hear a lot of Tom, he’s one of my good friends. People need good friends, because we become like those we know. We gain and lose weight with them, we become happy or sad with them. The people we identify with alter us completely, whether those people validate the connection or not.

            I love my friends. They change me.

            We were talking about becoming, and how much choice people have. Everyone has a choice. As a society, we recognise that the most disadvantaged have the most choice, and we try hard to make life better for the youth most likely to break off into antisocial behaviours. We recognise that adults have more choice about who they are than kids do, and so we hold them to a higher standard.

            I have news for you. No one’s told you this, but it’s high time someone did: You are the system. You are the standard.

            If you aren’t part of the solution, you ARE the problem, and so am I. We’re what gets in the way of responsible, peaceful society. But it’s worth also mentioning that the problems we are and the problems we face aren’t as mighty and all-consuming as people make them appear. If the economy (which is not an entity or edifice, but a description of what we do with our money) “collapses,” you and I will still be muddling along in daily lives. Harder daily lives, but still the same lives. Understand that there is no dream life to move up into, there’s no yawning chasm to pull you down- these things are in you, not in the world. No matter what you do, you will always be only a human being. You will bring your story with you. The power to move up to happy or down to despair is yours, in you, in your daily choices and your daily work.

            It affects the outside world, too. As a human being, you ARE the force that moves the wheel. You’re the one who consumes, the one who watches advertisements. This whole mess is not your fault, but it is certainly your business, just as it’s my business. We’re in it now, together, and even if you pull the plug, you haven’t logged out of the system. You are the system, you take it with you where you go. There’s nothing you can do except be you, as well and as truly as you can.

            So here we are, knowing that there’s work to do, and my handwriting is terrible.

            It’s more relevant than you think.

            The thing is, in our society, we dream about having, not about getting or making.  People want to be famous, but not great. They want to be recognised- they don’t dream of making one perfect chair, or one perfect symphony. We want true love to happen to us; we don’t want to work day in and day out at loving ourselves and others. We want, but we don’t want to be.

            That’s backwards. That’s totally and completely backwards. It makes sense that we’d end up thinking this way. We’re responding to the waves that came before us, the waves of freethinging, freewheeling hope that didn’t work out. It turned into commercialism for the first waves and and slacker culture for the latest. Freegans and weekend warriors, people who really understand that things need to change but don’t know how to use our system to do it. They’re right; things are wrong with our system, and not little things. But it can’t be corrected at the system level; it has to be corrected small, in our own little lives, because we are the system. Living cleanly, clearly, simply, and committing ourselves to making it better, and to helping each other, is how to fix the system.

            What you do in your downtime- the stillness, the bored times, the nothingness of processing- matters. Every choice you make matters. You don’t have to always be in a state of pure, absolute presence, because no one can live like that and really live. Little things like handwriting, like washing dishes, done right, change you. Whatever you’re doing, do it. Do it with a will. Pay attention and make it right. It’s small, but it changes things. It changes everything.

            Change the focus. Bring it from the long view of fame and fortune to the real view of what’s on hand. As a society, we’ve lost sight of our hands, and our handwriting, and all of the million things that make up our days. Reining that in, even a little, changes who we are, and gives us greater power over ourselves and our actions. Forget, for now, about being famous. It may still happen. On the other hand, you could be one of the few people on earth to make something lasting, and enduring, and beautiful, in ordinary life. That’s worth more than fame. That’s greatness, and greatness can’t be bought.

            In our daily lives, as we go about ordinary daily things, we don’t always recognise that everything we do is a choice. Everything. Every time your hands touch something, it’s an opportunity to make something right, something better, something perfect or at least as good as can be made by our hands. The Shakers understood this. The point of doing it right isn’t just to do it right and improve the world; getting it right improves us, and that’s how we get the world we want. It’s the glorious consequence of action: action changes us. Exercise begets strength, work begets result, and we become altered according to how we’ve done our daily lives.

            Everyone in my generation remembers the Karate Kid, and how waxing a car and sanding a deck became the foundations of a martial artist. We remember, but we don’t do it. Only the great do that, we think. Only those who are called. But what’s a calling? Our lives are here now. It takes effort to be present, zen-master levels of presence, to turn real life into improvement. But if we can manage it… if we can only manage it… we change. Work changes us. Everything that we do with all our will is something that we’re learning, and mastery comes through effort. Very seldom do we try to master ourselves, but there’s nothing more worth it. Work is calling, all the time.

            Right now, I’ve had about twenty eight years to practice my handwriting. I’ve had fifteen to get better at algrebra. I have brushed my teeth three times a day or more for three decades.  I’ve had countless interactions with people. I go to work, I go home. I drive an hour each way. I have no excuse for not being a better driver, a better worker, a better singer, a better friend. I have these opportunities. I have these chances, every single day. But I’m not practicing, I’m not trying, and I need to change that. I need to start practicing, paying attention, so that when I do it, I get better at it. Trying is a vote; trying is a choice. And choice is change.

            Choice begets choice: the more you use your vote, that little decision about who you become, the more vote you get.

My little sister came to me with a complaint about post-modernism, which she was being taught about in high school.

“It hurts,” she said.

I couldn’t agree more. She talked about how the breaking down of boundaries leaves very little to work with, and how it failed to replace them with anything that she could use. Since utility is a cornerstone of humanism, my attention was immediately piqued.

I went and reread a bit, and thought about this a lot. What I ended up telling her was that post-modernism serves a purpose, avery real purpose, and should not be mistaken for anything beyond that purpose. Post-modernism is about breaking down barriers, which were artificial in the first place. It’s all about breaking down, and it’s painful because we were using those bundaries.

Yes, the boundaries are imaginary. The lines we draw which separate trees from shrubs, men from women, and matter from energy- these are all fake. But we never create anything except what we use, so the question becomes, “What were we using these fake lines for?”

Buckets.

I’m not kidding. We live in a world where chopping wood and carrying water are essential parts of life. To get by in an ordinary world, we require systems of classification that let us organise and interact with the world. We’re creatures of order, and we classify. Ultimately, we’re faced with the recognition that the universe classifies only by action and not by type, so we’re awkwardly fumbling to protect our own minds when our typologies get rendered useless.

That’s not a bad thing. That’s what leads to the repeal of Jim Crow laws and the discovery of special relativity. It’s really, really important. Postmodernism at its height (for those who do not believe that we are at its height again) was a movement of broken sentences and jagged views, a movement of realising that we are the lenses and the film, and it’s up to us to include that in our reports of what we see.

http://www.colorado.edu/English/courses/ENGL2012Klages/pomo.html

But it doesn’t replace what has to happen next- the reorganisation of thought. Post-modernism does for philosophy what post-rock does for music. IT breaks down the existing rules, allowing the development of new, richer use of the medium. Post-rock’s breakout with Sigur Ros and Explosions in the sky has blossomed, turned into a rich garden of structures. We’re now faced with the abundance of fugues and fascinations, music with movements but modern sounds. Musicians, under the umbrella of sweeping melodic rock, have rediscovered what they liked about old school orchestra and kept it, throwing the rest of the limitations it described away.

The result is Caspian, and Hammock, nd Sky Flying Bye. I’ll wait while you Google them, that’s fine. Start with Caspian’s, “Ghosts of the Garden City,” and Sky Flying Bye’s “Tomorrow Morning’s Tide.”

The point is, the rules of the medium were changed just enough to let those musicians decide on rules that worked better for them. Destroying and deconstruction are only part of the puzzle. The important part, the harder part, is included in the “What now?” side of the equation- finding new ways of thinking and using the ideas, ways that work.

In psychology, we’re throwing away the parts of Freud’s ideas that were nonsense, and keeping the idea of things like the unconscious. Yes, we’re finding out that large parts of that unconscious are biological, and some are predetermined genetic trends (like developing language. Humans are great at language!) We’re keeping the parts that turned out to be true. Throwing ideas away was great, but only because we were ready with other truths that work.

In daily life, we have water to carry, so we need buckets. We have to have ideas. We will always need the compass correction movements, telling us that our ideas are artificial. We need those reminders. Now that we are reminded, what do we do about it?

We choose better buckets, and go back to carrying water. It’s what we do. The buckets are useful, but they aren’t the water, and ultimately, we classify by use for lack of any better method. The emperor may not be wearing clothing, and post-modernism is the child pointing this out on a regular basis. Whether we cancel the parade based on this information is up to us, but we must do something, and that’s where the pain of re-examination resolves into ordinary life again.

The Humanist Creed

I stand before you as an independent agent, autonomous and responsible for myself and my actions. Every thinking being is a world, unique and alive, and I am responsible for the maintenance of the world that I contain. Each of us is whole, unique, and possessed of limitless potential and our own quirks and limitations, and are responsible for the choices we make and the people we become.

I believe that what we do next is what matters most, and recognize that every action, inaction, and breath of becoming is a choice. I will not interfere with the choices of others unless they are causing real harm.

As humans, we are each whole and alive, and as people we are a society responsible for each individual’s environment. I will work for us as individuals, and for my own happiness and health, and for the happiness and health of individuals around me. I will work for the health and wholeness of our larger society so that we are free of the limitations which would impede that personal work. I take responsibility for all of my actions, and will fight unjust laws in ways that do not undermine social order or the rights and well-being of others. I will obey just laws and support the process of peoples’ self-government.

I will take issue with no one’s faith, nor with the matters of their heart, but only with the work of their hands, and I will not impose my own beliefs or feelings upon others as truth.

I  accept my own weaknesses and failures as opportunities for strength. I will not deny my fear, but I will not allow it to stop me from acting.  I will work to become earnest and honest in all my dealings, and truthful and kind in all my speech.

I will bring my entire self to bear on whatever work my hands might find, and will never be too proud for any honest work.

I consider enmity impractical, and anger to be a statement of need, and will seek solutions that consider the needs of everyone involved.

I will work to be someone who does not damage or destroy another except in self-defense, and I will not seek vengeance. I will consider justice that which heals all parties involved in the harm done. I will seek to mend where I have harmed, to work for reconciliation in all cases, and to forgive where I am able and try to earn forgiveness where I have wronged.

I will try to understand the material universe and encourage others in understanding, and I will support the ethical use of science and the teaching of scientific method. I will evaluate scientific claims through examination of scientific proofs, and will strive to be reasonable in my rejection of unproven theories. I will respect the rights of others to disagree with my conclusions, and examine all scientific counterclaims. I will respect the difference between the scientifically provable and matters of faith or feeling, and will not try to use either type of truth to attack the other.

I will protect and love and value all thinking beings, and delight in the experience of our mutual existence. I will do all that I can to improve that existence, and myself, through my work in it. I will consider as my own any work which comes my way that might improve our mutual condition, and will consider as my family the whole of human existence, bound together as one people, in one world, with one accord, whether others are upholding that accord or not. We are here together, each of us alone and as part of the world. I stand before you as a world, part of the larger world we all create, acknowledging this to be my place in it.



Someone you’ve never met can change your life. Scratch that- will change your life. Already has. And I don’t mean in the instant flash of light, the lightning bolt of transformation that we’re all secretly hoping for.

Yes, secretly. It’s not just you. Our movie industry runs on it, the idea that change is instant and permanent. Romeo and Juliet, had they lived, would never fight over folding laundry, or so we’re led to believe. Cinderella, having done housework, would never get harsh over the maid’s more tired days. Richard Gere will never get bored and pick up other pretty women, the couple finally finding each other at the end of the movie will still like each other in a year, the woman who stops chasing the man who’s bad for her will find the new soul mate she didn’t expect to somehow be making a wise and well-considered decision. Somehow. This time. We promise.   

            We believe in instant transformation, and we believe that we’ll know it when it happens. Most of the time, though, the things that makes us happy are gradual, and are not only things we didn’t plan, they’re things we don’t even know about. For example, strangers, people we never meet, see, or know of.

            Happiness is contagious. Being in the centre of the group doesn’t make you happy, but it gives you better odds coming into contact with happy people, and that will change you.

One thing I object to, in this article, is the idea that people “become happy people.” We’re not like cakes- the timer dings, and we’re done. Nor does becoming happy mean that you stay that way.  I doubt that the original study thinks of it this way, so let’s look. With questions like this (“What’s the operational definition that they use for, ‘happiness’?”) we can look at the actual text, rather than a reporting of it. http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/337/dec04_2/a2338

            Looking at the text of the study, “Emotional states can be transferred directly from one individual to another by mimicry and “emotional contagion,” perhaps by the copying of emotionally relevant bodily actions, particularly facial expressions, seen in others. People can “catch” emotional states they observe in others over time frames ranging from seconds to weeks. For example, students randomly assigned to a mildly depressed room-mate became increasingly depressed over a three month period,²and the possibility of emotional contagion between strangers, even those in ephemeral contact, has been documented by the effects of “service with a smile” on customer satisfaction and tipping.

Yet, despite the evidence that certain emotions might spread over short periods from person to person, little is known about the role of social networks in happiness or about whether happiness might spread, by a diverse set of mechanisms, over longer periods or more widely in social networks. As diverse phenomena can spread in social networks, We investigated whether happiness also does so. We were particularly interested in whether the spread of happiness pertains not just to direct relationships (such as friends) but also to indirect relationships (such as friends of friends) and whether there are geographical or temporal constraints on the spread of happiness through a social network. ^“”

            I’m going to talk a lot about Happiness, because it’s relevant to daily life. So what did they consider happiness to be?

 “To measure happiness, we use four items from the CES-D in which people were asked how often they experienced certain feelings during the previous week: “I felt hopeful about the future,” “I was happy,” “I enjoyed life,” “I felt that I was just as good as other people.” This subcomponent of the CES-D has been shown to be a valid instrument for measuring positive affect, and it has been taken as interchangeable with the concept of happiness. We defined “happy” as a perfect score on all four questions, but we obtain similar results if we treat happiness as a linear 0-12 scale that sums answers to all four questions (data not shown), with 0=rarely or none of the time (<1 day/week), 1=some or a little of the time (1-2 days/week), 2=occasionally or a moderate amount of the time (3-4 days/week), and 3=most or all the time (5-7 days/week). We performed confirmatory factor analysis and found that responses to these four questions were highly correlated with one another and therefore could be treated as additive measures of a single “happiness” scale, as documented by previous research (see appendix on bmj.com). The response rate among those who answered at least one question was 98.8%. We imputed missing items using Amelia, a multiple imputation procedure.

That’s pretty good. “I felt that I was just as good as other people.” We all want that. What this study found is that, temporarily at least (no long term future can be predicted from this yet) the people you don’t know help determine whether you’re happy.

            What?

            People you know, and identify with- people in your neighbourhood, who are in relatively the same class and lifestyle; people you’re friends with, especially same-gender; people you’re close to or even interact with regularly- are people you become like. We emulate those around us in gesture, in mood, in expression. We don’t usually notice it, but we do. One thing they spoke of in the study: put someone in with a depressed person for three months, and they’re more depressed. We become like the people we identify with, whether they identify with us or not. This shaped us from childhood onward, and it’s a huge part of getting by in everyday life. 

            People you associate with are affected by people around them. It’s a circle of contagion, and it works that way with smoking and obesity, why not with positive things, too?

            You don’t get a choice about it. You don’t even notice it. You don’t know whose smiles your neighbours have been exposed to. But this affects you.

            I’m not a big fan of happiness as a goal. Happiness is something to work for while we work for other things, because you can’t just sit around all day and stare at the sky being happy. Happy is a state, and states are things you balance into. As the study described above, happiness is being able to say, even when things go wrong, that you’re just as good as other people, that you like your life, and that you’re feeling good.

            My favourite happiness study is this one. It’s a long article that will change your life.

            We’ll come back to this article again and again, but this long study of human lives brings up that everlasting plea of humanity. How do we become happy? Valliant talks about this extensively.

            “His central question is not how much or how little trouble these men met, but rather precisely how—and to what effect—they responded to that trouble. His main interpretive lens has been the psychoanalytic metaphor of “adaptations,” or unconscious responses to pain, conflict, or uncertainty. Formalized by Anna Freud on the basis of her father’s work, adaptations (also called “defense mechanisms”) are unconscious thoughts and behaviors that you could say either shape or distort—depending on whether you approve or disapprove—a person’s reality.

Vaillant explains defenses as the mental equivalent of a basic biological process. When we cut ourselves, for example, our blood clots—a swift and involuntary response that maintains homeostasis. Similarly, when we encounter a challenge large or small—a mother’s death or a broken shoelace—our defenses float us through the emotional swamp. And just as clotting can save us from bleeding to death—or plug a coronary artery and lead to a heart attack—defenses can spell our redemption or ruin. Vaillant’s taxonomy ranks defenses from worst to best, in four categories.

At the bottom of the pile are the unhealthiest, or “psychotic,” adaptations—like paranoia, hallucination, or megalomania—which, while they can serve to make reality tolerable for the person employing them, seem crazy to anyone else. One level up are the “immature” adaptations, which include acting out, passive aggression, hypochondria, projection, and fantasy. These aren’t as isolating as psychotic adaptations, but they impede intimacy. “Neurotic” defenses are common in “normal” people. These include intellectualization (mutating the primal stuff of life into objects of formal thought); dissociation (intense, often brief, removal from one’s feelings); and repression, which, Vaillant says, can involve “seemingly inexplicable naïveté, memory lapse, or failure to acknowledge input from a selected sense organ.” The healthiest, or “mature,” adaptations include altruism, humor, anticipation (looking ahead and planning for future discomfort), suppression (a conscious decision to postpone attention to an impulse or conflict, to be addressed in good time), and sublimation (finding outlets for feelings, like putting aggression into sport, or lust into courtship).”

The moral of the story is really, really simple. When the tree gives you lemons, eat them.

            Take them in. Learn from them. Learn everything lemon. Use them any way you can, plan for a future without them, give away whatever you can get from them, share them, explore them. Cope with them. SEIZE them, grab them, and don’t let them go until you’ve wrung something vital and valuable from them. Take every last bit of lemon out of it, and steal its meaning for yourself. Learn lemon.

You’re going to have pain. That’s life. You’re going to have misery. That’s human. You’re going to have obstacle after stupid, stinking, humbling and mortifying obstacle. But- and this is the eternal point, the one writ large on my little leaf of the tree- now that you know this, what will you do? What will you do now?

            If there’s a motto to my life, that’s it. Now do something with it. Mature adaptations are the difference between happy people and unhappy people, in the long run. You are going to have the troubles of your life, all of them. What you decide, through your choice of adaptations, is what you’re also going to have. And the scary part is, you’re deciding, through the network of contagion, whether other people will feel happy, too. Other people are affecting you, and you’re affecting them. The cycle is happening all the time, and you’re part of it.

            So when life gives you lemons, you’re sharing them. It can’t be helped. And you’re going to have the lemons of other people’s lives piled on you, along with their lemonade stands and pies and everything else they do to try to cope with the life they’re living. You have to find a way to deal with that.

Whatever you do, you’re going to be a day older tomorrow, whether you’ve done anything constructive today or not. Whatever lemons you have today, you will have more tomorrow, no matter what you’ve done with them. Whether you’ve smiled at your neighbours, whether you’ve found coping strategies, whether you’ve found happiness or not.

            Is is a public service to be happy? Is this something we owe to everyone, to spread happiness? Well, we owe it to ourselves to keep things healthy, and that takes some element of health, ourselves. But we’re also individuals, and that means that we only owe it to the group not to damage them. Be you. Try for happy, if you can’t feel happy, try for healthy. If you can’t manage either, be honest about it, and start biting down on the lemons to get what you can out of it while you’re dealing with it. At the very least, no one in your social network will get scurvy.

So strangers, even now, are changing you. And you’re changing you. Happiness may not be the point (it’s just a state-measurement) but it’s definitely contagious, and definitely nicer to experience, long-term, than unhappiness. So when there are lemons, eat them. Be polite, play fair, and pick up your lemons and find ways to cope with them. Learn lemon until something else grows.

I’ll admit it: I like red lights.

While you’re fussing and fuming at them, I’m cheerfully gliding to a stop. I LIKE red lights, in exactly that way that makes you crazy. I stop on the yellow (that’s what it’s for. Don’t pretend you didn’t see it. All you’re doing is lying.)

            Red lights mean a lot to me. No, they didn’t save my life this one time, or help me move, and they don’t solve injustice or avenge the wrongs of society or listen to me talk about my angst-driven daily life.

          No. stoplights make me happy because they are a social compact. They’re a promise that all of us make when we get our drivers’ licenses. Traffic signals and signs are the single best example I can think of to demonstrate that most people, given a clear choice, do the right thing most of the time.

            Not all the time. I’ve run them accidentally myself. It happens. But like most things, we choose on a daily basis without ever giving it a second thought. People stop at stoplights because that’s how it works. And most of the time, seemingly miraculously, it does work.

          When you were a kid, you played the game. Red light, green light.  One kid faces the wall. They say, “green light,” and everyone scrambles forward. “1-2-3 Red light!” cries the stoplight child, and whirls around. Anyone still moving is “out.” The first to reach the stoplight crier under these rules becomes the next stoplight.  Red light. Stop. Green light. Go.

            That’s the thing about society that amazes me. Not that we’re a bunch of little ants plowing along on our ordained paths, following blindly the rules of our society, but that we aren’t. We’re a swarming, teeming mass of people crowded around the technological fires of our cities, struggling each to our own. Heading for our own destinations, we’re a throng of self-important butterflies, fragile but fanatically determined to make our way in the world. We’re straddling heroically the demands of the group and the call of our own little lives in it. Add in the occasional blasting, overwhelming, daily-life-destroying bit of perspective on how small we are compared to the whole grand scheme of things, and you’ve got a recipe for disaster soup with a side of self-immolation fries.

            And yet, somehow, that usually doesn’t happen.

             Oh, it happens once in awhile, and when it does, it makes the news. It’s rare, it’s noteworthy, it’s the exception, rather than the rule.

            Somehow, most of the time, when it comes down to deciding how to behave, the balance of all those social forces and all our internal compasses pushes most of us in the direction of making it work. Somehow, in spite of the fact that everyone on the road is going to their own life, their own goals, it all just works.

            The lights keep coming on because the electricians do their work. The roads keep being paved, the drivers keep getting born, the roads keep intersecting and diverging, and somehow, it works. We usually stop at red lights. We usually go at green ones. We know the rules of the road, and most of the time, we actually follow them.

            We don’t always, and there’s actually a wide body of research as to why. One of my all-time favourite researchers, Dr. Roy F. Baumeister, is probably the first place I’d send you for an understanding. He’s one of the people putting our common knowledge to the test, and honestly, his book Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty left me feeling essentially optimistic about humanity, despite its painful places. The truth is, while under the right circumstances, almost any one of us can experience the moral erosion which allows for brutal and terrible acts, most of us, under normal circumstances, don’t.

            Let me repeat that. Under the right circumstances, any one of us can become a monster. Anyone. Really. There are some circumstances that would reduce anyone to a monster, and I’m not talking about protecting your wife from rabid wildebeest encyclopedia salesmen during the monster apocalypse. I’m talking about the slow erosion of your moral defenses, with the company of others around you who are on the same train. The Hitlers and Mussolinis succeed because they have help. Lots and lots of help. 

            This happens in small ways, too. Under the right circumstances, any one of us would run a stoplight. I’ve seen it done by people I would never suspect had it in them. Under the right circumstances… which is why we owe it to ourselves to understand those “circumstances,” made of internal and external pressures, and do what we can to avoid letting them ever build up around and within us. It’s no guarantee, but it’s a pretty good start. Stoplights are a part of that. By not running stoplights, we reaffirm that the social agreement is still in place. We promise to follow the rules that we chose. We choose a small interruption in the name of making the traffic work better for everyone.

            That’s pretty good, if you ask me. So I love stoplights, because they’re a sign of us managing to balance the needs of our mighty swarm of people with our own, individual wants and needs, without really needing to think about it all the time. It works, and most of the time, we do what we said we’d do when we got our licenses. We play fair.

            I really, really like that. I don’t always think about it when I’m stopped in traffic, but it’s why red lights give me that cheerful feeling. Yes, they’re annoying. Yes, I’m running late. But we, as a group, are actually getting somewhere, and I feel pretty good about that.

            (As a side note, I’d like to nominate downtown Malden, MA, as one of the most difficult-to-obey traffic light patterns that I’ve ever encountered.)