Geiger Counter

Beyond good & bad   A woman won the lottery. All of her friends stopped by to congratulate her.  “You won $10 million!” they said. “That’s great! You are so lucky.” “Maybe,” she replied.  Her friends, who were sure they understood far more of the world than they actually did, walked away shaking their heads, puzzled by her response. A few months later, the woman bought her son, who was 19, a car with some of the money. It was new and shiny, and full of fancy electronic features. One day, while driving to class, the new car slid on some ice and smashed into another vehicle. The young man’s leg was badly broken.  “You will walk with a limp for the rest of your life,” said the doctor. “Physical therapy will take many months, maybe years.”  The woman’s friends all called to offer their condolences.  “We’re so sorry your son was injured!” they said. “What a horrible accident! This is terrible.” “Maybe,” the woman replied.  Again, they were befuddled. How could she be so unsure of the true nature and implications of the things that happened around her?  A few months later, war broke out. Millions of people died. Troops were depleted by atomic and biological weaponry, mowed down by drones and blown apart in far-away trenches. Soon, with few willing soldiers left, the new draft began. The conscription board spared the woman’s son, however, because of his twisted leg. Many would perish, but he would live.  “You are so lucky!” said the woman’s friends.  “Maybe,” she replied.  While at home, the young man fell in love with his physical therapist. The two were married, and they had a young son whom they loved deeply. The child loved the sound of his father’s approach, so distinct and different from the gates of other people, and the three lived a happy life together. Their family was happier than most, full of laughter and mirth and freshly baked muffins and little rituals and jokes.  “They are very lucky,” said people.  “Maybe,” replied the mother.  Because their love was so much deeper than most, their family’s inevitable separation was all the more painful. First, the man with the damaged leg died of cancer. Then, his wife passed away in an accident. The young boy, now fully grown, mourned them more deeply than most. The pain was in exact proportion to the love they had felt.  “This is very tragic,” said people.  When she heard this, the boy’s grandmother, who had won the lottery many years ago, looked her grandson in the eyes with love and said to him, “Maybe.”  Most people like to dichotomize the people, things and events around them. They divide everything into “good” and “bad” categories, as if they are forks and spoons and knives to be placed in their own portion of the drawer each day. In truth, the very ideas of good and bad are arbitrary human constructions. There is only what happens, and how we choose to respond to it. There is only the world, which is as it is and will always be as it always is, and those who waste their very limited time trying to artificially separate and categorize the world around them are doomed to only understand something that is artificial and created purely of their own limited cognition.  I try to spend time every day in the wilderness. I do not care if the landscape is native or invasive, hot or cold, wooded or vast and sweeping. I care only that it is the culmination of a living path not intentionally guided by human hands. I have a friend who often teases me for never bothering to learn the proper names of all the birds and plants I encounter, but really their given names have nothing to do with them, in my eyes. The osprey does not know that “osprey” is the sound we make for it and that “osprey” is the series of stains on paper that we make to represent it. Because neither of those things is an osprey, they are purely human inventions, representative shadows of real, living things that glide through the air.   My daughter asked me the other day if some leaves she was standing near were poison oak or poison ivy. “I don’t know,” I replied. “But I do know they will give you a rash.”  If they did, (spoiler alert: they did), most people would say: “Oh, no, that’s terrible!”  To which I would reply, “Maybe.”  In any case, the leaves, which do not actively harm us in any way, by the way (we get a rash only because our bodies mistakenly think they are harmful and attack our own flesh when we come into contact with them), do not know their taxemic names. They simply are, they exist, which is neither good nor bad.  We live in what is inarguably the best time in human history to be alive. People live decades longer than they ever have before, we have unlimited access to art, literature, scientific information and food. Miraculous advances in travel have made it possible to see the entire world, and amazing new medicines have made it possible to extend the lives of those who would have, at any time in history but this one, been doomed by something as treatable as diabetes or poor vision or even a minor bacterial infection. The poorest people in our current society are often overfed to the point of being obese. Anyone who wants to read the entire works of Shakespeare or Plato can do so for free, on their phone, whenever they feel like it.  “This is great!” is always my first impulse. Then I have to remind myself that I don’t really know.  But without question, the most privileged people are the ones who complain the most about the state of the world.  “This is all terrible!” they say about, well, literally everything.  Maybe, I think. Maybe not.  I do not know what events in the world around me are good, and which are bad. I suspect that most people, regardless of politics or gender or ethnicity or religion or intellect, are a mix of traits that simply are what they are. Each person is a culmination of experiences and influences, with a dash of agency. People have always been desperate to define themselves, because defining oneself is the first step toward knowing oneself. Unfortunately, the laziest way to define oneself is to simply go through life pointing out other people who you label as bad, and who you feel are unlike you. But being a different person than someone you call “bad” does not in any way make you good or moral or virtuous, which I believe should be a disclaimer tacked on to the end of every tweet.  The story at the beginning of this column is a Taoist one. It is very old. Taoism, including the works of Lao Tzu, is often associated with nature. It’s no wonder, because the natural world is full of examples of beautiful living things that adapt to the world around them, rather than spending their lives trying to bend the ecosystem to their will. The most beautiful thing about most of the plants and creatures that are our neighbors, is that they can so swiftly and innovatively adapt themselves to the world. Very few of them try to actively change the world to meet their needs. But in adapting and thriving, they do, of course, have an impact on the landscape, but it is a natural, wild byproduct of their success as a species, not a tyrannical plan created to change the behaviors and natures of those with whom they share a forest or a stream.  We live in a vast, labyrinthine, meandering, befuddling world. It is much easier to adapt than to try to forcefully change everything around you. It’s becoming very common to prod young children to “grow up and change the world.” The foundation in which this idea rests is that the current world is not good enough for them. The beauty of Lao Tzu’s writing is that he, along with others such as Marcus Aurelius, reminds us that the world is simply the world. It is as it is, and anyone who thinks they can change the world (or, change it without causing enormous suffering to countless innocent people in the process) is destined for folly. There is something enormously liberating about accepting the things that confront all of us. Death. Illness. Loss. Mystery and relativism.  When I look at our little corgi, with tiny little stumps for legs, I am reminded that these dogs were used to herd cattle in Wales. They did not ask cows to stop being mean, to stop kicking. They did not ask cows to change; rather, they adapted short legs so they could duck beneath the cattle’s deadly hooves.  People often think this is selfish to live well in the world as it currently is, rather than trying to force the world into a newer and better form designed to accommodate us and our fickle whims. But in truth, the best way to make the world a better place is to live well, to do and be good, and to know that maybe - just maybe - we are very fortunate to be here.