Be
Odd
“What
makes you different or weird, that’s your strength.”
Meryl
Streep
Do you
ever feel like you’re living in a dreamscape? Like everyone else knows what’s
going on except you? I do all the time. For instance, I watched the Super Bowl
with some friends recently, truly just to see the commercials, but when they
came on, I had no idea what they meant. I felt like I had entered the Twilight
Zone or been blown through a wormhole in outer space. Then I remembered my
great-grandmother Richardson sitting in our living room in Chattanooga in 1952,
watching our first television—a big wooden box with a small, grey, octagonal
screen. She was an old, farm woman in a calico dress, and a pair of laced-up,
black shoes old women wore back then. Her grey hair pulled back in a tight bun,
she resembled Granny on Beverly Hillbillies, except she was hefty. She scrutinized
the TV as though an alien lifeform crouched across the room from her, and after
a commercial for some cleaning product, she turned to my mother and said, “That’s
a big ol’ lie.”
Feeling
odd, weird, and out of step is to be expected when you get older. In your
lifetime, everything has changed multiple times, and nowadays, technology has accelerated
the speed of that change. It is tempting to say, “That’s a big ol’ lie,” to
lots of things. Technology has been wonderful in some ways, and terrible in
others. Obviously, we’re not going back, and mostly no one wants to, but there’s
also no denying that technology has affected our human relationships, our
ability to communicate through language, the quality of our speech, and our
relationship with the natural world. And those changes are not for the better.
Being
odd is something that, at times, I cherish. I confess to not wanting to spend
the amount of time on a computer that it would take to become proficient. There
is something about video conferencing—like Zoom—that exhausts me. Over the
weekend, there was a Jungian seminar that I was interested in, but it would
have meant six hours on Zoom, and I just couldn’t do it. When I talked to a
friend who attended, she praised the speaker, but not the medium. The video and
audio of the attendees was blocked to avoid distracting from the presenter. But
what it also blocked out was the relational aspects of the gathering. People
couldn’t see each other, couldn’t read the body language or feel the presence
of others. In many ways, even though it was a seminar titled “Longing and Belonging,”
the humanity had been stripped out of it. That’s ironic, don’t you think?
I had an
email from my cousin Sandy this morning saying she had read my post on being a
nature-bonded child, and about how we grew up playing in the woods. She wrote, “I’m
so glad we grew up when we did.” That lifestyle is no longer mainstream. Kids
who are growing up the way we did, outside and in the woods, are probably considered
strange by their peers. My message to them is a quote from Catherynne M. Valente,
who wrote In the Cities of Coin and Spice, “All things are strange
which are worth knowing.” Hang in there, odd ones. Embrace your weirdness. It’s
where you’ll find your strength.
In
the Spirit,
Jane
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