A
Different Drummer
“The
vines are people who are afraid of original new thinking. Most people
you encounter will be vines; when you are young they are very
dangerous. Always listen to yourself...It is better to be wrong than
simply to follow convention. If you are wrong, no matter, you have
learned something and you grow stronger. If you are right, you have
taken another step toward a fulfilling life.”
Bryce
Courtenay (The Power of One)
Following up on
yesterday's post about belonging to oneself, I ran across this piece
of advice from Bryce Courtenay in The Power of One. He and
every single progressive, creative person I have ever read or
encountered stressed the idea of believing in oneself and charting
one's own course. Most of us, myself included, began our young lives
by following convention—we grew up, we went to college, we married
and had children. That is the way of collective consciousness, and
there is absolutely nothing wrong with it—it stabilized the culture
and promotes the continuation of the species. Most of us stay on that
path for our whole lives. It's stable, it's non-threatening, we know
what to do and what to say, and we never have to think an independent
thought or take an independent action. There is safety in it, and
there will forever be a great community of people who surround and
support us...as long as we don't venture off course.
When we do venture off
course—let's say we have a teacher or a mentor along the way who
models something different for us—then the very same people who had
surrounded and supported us too often become “vines.” You can't
fault them for it; they don't want to lose you because that would
cause them pain, and they truly don't want you to say and do things
that might draw them off course, too. It's hard to blaze your own
trail—much harder than staying in the lap of convention. But, some
of us simply can't go the conventional route. We prefer to be out in
the weeds and off the clearly marked path.
Sometimes, in fact,
“weeds people” are driven by their curious minds, sometimes by an
insatiable desire to discover what's inside, underneath, behind any
particular set of conventional stratagems. Why do we believe that; where did it come from? What they discover is that we believe it
because our parents told us it was right, or our teachers told us, or
our church told us, and so on. Ideas that are simply and profoundly wrong can come
down the generations without being questioned, simply because they
are considered “conventional wisdom.” Take, for example, these
few: White people are superior to people of color. Women are fragile
and should be protected from harm. Women do not make good leaders.
Only Christians are true believers. We did not steal the land from
Native Americans, and we did not enslave black people, because all of
that was ordained by God. I could go on and on, here, and so could
you. Convention dictates that we stay within the box of beliefs that
we've been handed. Weeds people simply can't do that. They need to do
the research and discover for themselves what is true and what is
not.
I don't recommend
departing from convention. It's a path of suffering. You will cry
when you look at oceans filled with plastic, and human children
pulled from desperate parents' arms. You will lie awake nights
thinking about all the men and women languishing in prisons in the
land of the free, most of them black or brown, for doing things you
did yourself but didn't get caught. On the other hand, however,
keeping your own soul in your own possession is a supreme act of
freedom. And living in a land where you can speak your truth, no
matter how unconventional, is revolutionary. I'll stick with the
weeds. How about you? Do you march to a different drummer?
In the Spirit,
Jane
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