goodness – Surprised By Joy

“One moment can change a day. One day can change a life and one life can change the world.” – Buddha

The other day I took my kids to an outdoor shopping center. They’d been excited for three days because I said we could go there to visit the one store that makes honest to goodness cotton candy. Not the stuff you can buy prepackaged on shelves in the grocery store but a machine that spins a cone of it. I don’t like cotton candy but my daughter wanted to try it so I agreed she could if we got the real stuff.

On the way to the cotton candy machine, my kids were playing in a fountain and my daughter put her face down to lick the water. “Arghh” I said, “Don’t drink the water. It isn’t treated and probably has dirt, bird poop and maybe worse. It could make you sick.” She stopped but two minutes later she made the same motion and I had to stop her again. “Listen” I said “I know as a kid you are programmed to test the limits, but this is one where you need to believe me. Even if you don’t drink it, your little brother is going to see you, imitate you and he might actually drink it. So you are just going to have to trust me and not drink it.”

I could see the wheels of her 6-year-old brain working. She was thinking something like
“I’ve never tried it so I’ve never gotten sick. How can I know what Mom is saying is right?”

There’s no way to prove a negative. If we don’t do something and it the consequence is avoided, how do we know what didn’t happen to us? I heard an interview once with Matthew Weiner, the creator of the TV series Mad Men, and he said the show’s driving philosophy was actions have consequences. But what about inaction?

What if we don’t do the work to deal with our internal BS so we can see others more clearly?

What if we don’t write the letter to a sick friend?

What if we don’t go out of our way to compliment or help someone?

What if we don’t put the grocery cart back in the return slot at the store?

What if we just aimed for a grade C life? Not great, not bad, just average. Would anything happen to us?

Perhaps the consequence for inaction is nothing. Nothing exciting happens, nothing revelatory occurs, no random goodness pops up, nobody remembers us. Nothing. We aren’t a hero – just a zero.

On the other hand, we’ve done acts of kindness and felt the afterglow, we’ve made the effort to reach out to friends and experienced the relationships that carry us through tough times, and we’ve done the work to clean our internal windows because we see how more light gets in. In addition to these rewards, we’ve heard the thinkers throughout human history telling us to do our work:

“Good actions give strength to ourselves and inspire good actions in others.” – Plato

“Go into the world and do well. But more importantly, go into the world and do well.” – Minor Myers, Jr.

“When we do the best we can, we never know what miracle is wrought in our life, or the life of another.” – Helen Keller

We all have our different ways of doing our best and our personal limits. But part of the we likely do it is because our mom, dad or someone else with authority told us and we believed them. Like with my daughter, there’s no way to prove the negative – what would happen if we did nothing, so we take the advice and continue to try. Thank goodness for that.

“Sharp people learn from their mistakes. But the real sharp ones learn from the mistakes of others.” – Brandon Mull

I got a new client this week. She was introduced to me by a mutual contact that told her I could help. She is clearly very bright and has done a lot of research but given the huge amount of documentation on the technology choices she has to make, she just needed someone to weigh in on what would work best because she doesn’t have time to try out every option herself.

After only a 30 minute phone call in which we talked through her options, she was ready to go with what I recommended. Of course, the technology we were talking about is my specialty and has been for 20 years but what struck me was how openly she was able to learn.

According to Nicholas Christakis, a sociologist from Yale, this is the hallmark of the human species. Christakis’ work in the field of sociology is about the long view of human history. He’s deeply optimistic about our ability to cooperate, teach others and love because we are one of the only species that does that outside of the family structure. In his book, Blueprint, Christakis lays out the case that “natural selection has given us a suite of beneficial social features including our capacity for love, friendship, cooperation and learning.”

Of course one of the places this is easiest to see has been with my kids over the last few years as they’ve learned to talk. When my son was one and just starting to talk he called water, “Mamu.” He and my brother’s wife, who was nannying for me, use to have a funny verbal game they’d play. He’d said, “mamu”, she’d say “water” and it would go on for a minute until they both broke out in laughter. And then eventually he accepted that it was water, just like he’s learned all the other hundreds of words he can say, because he trusts the caretakers in his life.

Which reminds me of my ex-husband. He had good reasons to believe his parents weren’t reliable sources of information. His dad used to say to me, “I knew my boy was smart when I came in to beat him with a belt and he asked for me to beat him with the wooden spoon instead.” And it was in his senior year of high school when he was living with his dad and step-mom and they moved in the middle of a night to a different state to avoid a tax debt without telling him (or bringing him) so he had to find a place to live on his own.

I think they were one of the reasons that he couldn’t learn from other people (or maybe the primary reason he couldn’t). And that was behind my reluctance to have kids with him was because I couldn’t bear the thought of having him experiment on children as the only way to learn the best way to parent.

So I understand that we all have different levels of openness to learning and that it might vary within a person by topic. But it gives me great hope when I witness the human ability to trust and learn like I did with my client this week. Because it resonates with what I’ve gleaned from Nicholas Christakis’ work – that we have come this far because we are wired to cooperate and learn. Coupled with Arthur Brook’s concept of crystallized intelligence that I wrote about last week, the idea that as we age we develop intelligence more suited to synthesize, tell stories and teach, it seems we have the right ingredients to pass on goodness to the next generation and beyond.

(featured photo is of my dad teaching a class)

Tag: goodness

Proving the Positive

Wired to Learn