I gave myself a few days off from writing. It started first with, “I don’t feel like writing today”, largely because of the summary issue which interferes with some of my plans and needs to be addressed1.
It’s easy to lose inertia. All you have to do is stop moving, which is easy enough because life’s frictional forces will happily put you to rest.
Then I got involved in some ‘debates’ regarding different things in a group, and saw pretty clearly how there are two main sides and they are so busy ‘debating’ that they seem to have forgotten, or never realized, that the frame of a debate or discussion is easily expanded.
People only seem to know how to make frames smaller. Maybe those are their strong muscles constricting discussion into increasingly small areas, and yet what we have found in the world is that the seemingly minuscule almost always has a broader context.
The frames are generally handed to us by others. Republicans versus Democrats, coffee versus tea, cats versus dogs, The Beatles versus Elvis, and so on. You’re expected to have a side, and if you don’t, you’re graded on scales of either.
I like big frames. When I don’t understand things, or when I don’t have an answer or more importantly better questions, I wander. Or wonder. The two words are wonderfully interchangeable, with one exception being this sentence.
Why do we instinctively draw smaller frames when trying to understand something, or discuss something? Is it our eyes, allowing us to attenuate light so the grey matter encased in our skills can focus? Why can’t we focus more broadly?
These, I think, are better questions, and something I’m having fun exploring.
Sometimes, you need to wander the shifting landscape around you to discover where you are.
When’s the last time you orbited your position?
I have developed a few strategies on this, which are on the back burner now and which I’ll share maybe this week. They are benign in nature, and publishing it might help stem the tide. ↩︎
I was going through some memories on Facebook this morning and came across something I’d written 2 years ago:
“Sometimes, when looking back, you’ll see that nothing ‘went wrong’ but [as much as] sometimes it just wasn’t right to begin with.
As you grow older, ‘sometimes’ increases significantly.”
I don’t remember exactly what I was thinking about when I wrote that. It could have been anything in my past, a past of places, times, and different versions of me.
At the time, too, I was listening to Linkin Park’s “Somewhere to Belong”.
“Somewhere To Belong”, Linkin Park, with lyrics.
It doesn’t always occur to us, we who search for a place to belong, that maybe we aren’t meant to belong, that we are supposed to be in motion, and the yearning to belong gives us itchy feet.
This could explain how humans all wandered off from South Africa – if people felt like they belonged, they would not have left. Maybe there wasn’t enough food. Maybe there weren’t enough women. Maybe someone’s intelligence or lack thereof didn’t allow them to fit in. Maybe they were just jerks.
When I did a google search on “feelings of not belonging”, you find things on mental health – actually, some pretty good stuff that could be possible for an individual. I liked this response to ‘a feeling of not belonging’ here, and there are enough legitimate answers that if you really feel like you don’t belong, you should talk to a psychologist. I did, though not about that particular thing – but I addressed it and it’s not that I am off my rocker.
Sometimes you just don’t belong where you are, literally or figuratively.
We come from thousands of years of change, perhaps even billions of years depending on your perspective, but we only see a lifetime’s worth, a very small fraction of who we are. We are inherently wanderers, this stacking of people on top of each other is pretty new to humanity. Most religious texts have people wandering around somewhere, maybe even all of them.
Some people do not want to wander, they want to stay where they are. I used to think they were the crazy ones. In some ways, I still do, those who are happy with routine and the same ideas and thoughts comforting them like a blanket, but we are told these days that that is normal.
Part of me wants to say that society has normalized this, and maybe that’s true to an indeterminate degree, but if that were true then every city would be filled with crazy people. Some think that’s the case, but I elect to believe that statistically, cities show the significance of wanting to stay in one place in an undeniable way.
Both can be completely normal.
I’ve always had itchy feet myself, always wanting to explore a place or an idea, and part of that could be associated with my childhood, but really, it’s just who I am. I don’t want to see the same things, hear the same things, smell the same things over and over and over. I don’t fit in with people who do not have that feeling, and I shouldn’t – they are happy as they are. They are not curious. They are not explorers. They are settlers, and that’s an important aspect of being human.
Wanderers, though, seem also to be natural. While feelings of alienation or not belonging can be symptoms of legitimate mental health concerns, sometimes it’s natural. I love the feel of motion, I love the wind through my hair. I love learning new things.
For me, it’s when I can’t experience something new that I feel trapped. That paralysis and being imprisoned can also feel like much the same thing, but they are not the same. The former is done to one’s self, the other by others. The hint here is that there’s only one person you can control. Yourself.
The trouble is how we frame ourselves and are framed by others in these disagreements we call life.
Looking for somewhere to belong can just be an excuse to do something different. Go somewhere different. Experience something different.
And yeah, it is worth checking with a mental health practitioner. Probably the easiest medical people to deal with.
It used to be that when you didn’t agree with the group, you’d wander off somewhere else on the planet and do your own thing. It could be about anything – if you saw more good in the risk of leaving the group than the bad of staying, you could wander off. Do your own thing, whatever it was, wherever you went. It was all pretty straightforward. If you got a group together that agreed on this, you’d have your own little starter tribe moving off to another part of the world.
No matter where you go…
The beauty of the world was that we hadn’t quite figured out that it was round, much less finite. It was all pretty infinite since we were using our feet back then. Then more you disagreed, the further you and your group walked. Maybe you were very angry but you find somewhere relatively near that was hospitable, and because of that you ended up closer than you probably should have to your original tribe. So you came up with a tree branch that you could whack other people with, or you figured out how to sharpen it. If you encountered people that you didn’t like, it was a simple matter of whacking them over the head or introducing them to your sharp and pointy stick. Eventually they would do the same.
Maybe you reconciled. Maybe you didn’t. At some point, you either ran out of people or one group moved further away than another. Things moved on. Nobody remembers Ug’s last stand where he was surrounded by pointy sticks, all begun because he believed in picking the fruits a little earlier than they did. Ug felt strongly enough to die for it. He’s not in your history books. Ug also had strong feelings about quantum mechanics, but we’ll never know.
If only Ug had wandered away, we might know.
And so diversity in thought came to the world as people moved just far enough away from each other to not get on each other’s nerves. They created little genetic pockets that caused a change in appearance, however small, even as they figured out how to make metal to chop down forests so that they could use that new invention, fertilizer. Populations grew, and soon the distance that was far enough some time ago was no longer far enough away for some. Wars were waged, walls were built, and conquerors decided that their way of life was so good that people wouldn’t mind a little violence to have their way of life.
As luck would have it, during that violence many people who disagreed with the invading way of life would be removed from the planet…. or the invading force who was convinced of how awesome their way of life was were removed. None of this was decided on merits. It was decided by technology, by aggression, and by strategy. There are some that say that this hasn’t changed very much since.
During all of this, one of the descendants of the folks that killed Ug – remember Ug? – figured out that things floated and, with a little work, they could make things that could take them over water. On a planet mainly covered in water, this was a pretty big deal though they didn’t know it at the time. Some guy would later be accused of proving the Earth was round the same year that the globe was invented, all because he was lost. He wasn’t the first, of course, but the people who wrote the history books wanted him to appear first – so he did. We know better now.
And so some people got to wander again, finding different lands where – surprise – they found different people who had been minding their own business and fighting with each other for as long as they could remember. This was inconvenient, so after a while they conquered them if they didn’t slaughter them. Or, maybe it was time to have some slaves again – slave technology had been around for a long time and hadn’t changed much. For slave owners, who had the authority and power granted to them by themselves, sea faring meant being able to travel with the comforts of slavery to do things that they wanted to do without getting too dirty or sweaty. That these were other human beings didn’t mean too much to them. In fact, they denied it despite obvious indications that this was so.
Populations grew. There was no real place left to wander, and when you get enough people packed closely together for a long enough period of time, they find things to fight over. They did. World Wars came and went, bringing aircraft into the mix even as they started flying around. And so things went.
Meanwhile, with people all over occupying more and more land, there needed to be more effective ways to communicate. Before you know it, there were wires running and people tapping away in code to let other people know something that someone thought was important.
This evolved to the Internet, which you are likely using right now. Connecting the world that had been made of wanderers, it demonstrates how far apart people have grown more often than not.
