Raptitude.com

There’s a timeless story trope where the hero is wandering the streets, lost in worry or despair, when the universe sends a sign. His gaze lands on a mother bird feeding her chicks, or a neon cross in a tattoo parlor window, breaking him out of his daze and awakening him to a path he didn’t see.

I’m not sure whether the universe does that kind of thing on purpose. But I think we’ve all experienced similar poetic signals, and we’re affected by them whether they’re ultimately haphazard, or somehow authored for us.

On a rainy Tuesday, just when your world is feeling small and lonely, someone texts you out of the blue, reminding you that you already have a lot of wonderful people in your life, if you care to reach out to them.

You’re procrastinating on an important task by making a needless walk to the corner store. On the way, you pass a box of free books, and sitting on top is a copy of Hamlet. A distant church bell tolls.

You’re thinking in circles about whether to relocate for a new job, when the driver behind you honks. You look up and the light is green. “Go already!” he shouts.

In a modern vehicle you could cross 500 miles of rocky desert in one day, without even getting your pants dirty.

This is made possible by the many layers of insulation modernity puts between you and the world. The car sits on inflated rubber tires, on top of which sits a chamber suspended by springs and pneumatic shock-absorbers. This chamber contains adjustable plush chairs and entertainment options, and protects you from heat, rain, dust, and rattlesnakes. The whole apparatus rolls along a smooth ribbon of pavement that’s been cut into the landscape with dynamite and bulldozers.

This system of insulation against the desert and its harsh conditions is so effective that it feels like you’re not even in the desert. When one of those layers of insulation fails – a blown tire or faulty air conditioning – the reality that you’re still just a vulnerable human body surrounded in three dimensions by brutal desert becomes inescapable.

You are always completely embedded in your surroundings like this. Your body and its sense organs are always in intimate, unbroken contact with your surroundings, molecule-to-molecule, whether it’s the searing air of a desert or the cool interior of an air-conditioned car. This condition — your continuous, unbroken contact with the world — can be overlooked but never escaped.

Pretend your life ended years ago, and you’ve been living in some sort of agreeable afterlife. You don’t have real problems anymore. There’s no stress, no war, no worries, no shame.

The only downside, if you would call it that, is that you don’t get to live in the world anymore. Despite all the troubles of worldly life, most of your afterlife peers feel a bit of nostalgia about “being in the thick of it again.”

The afterlife community, among other activities, holds a weekly raffle. The prize is kept private – only the winners know what it is, and they must sign a non-disclosure agreement.

One week, you win, and accept the prize. An administrator congratulates you, you sign the papers, and he touches you on the arm.

Instantly your surroundings change.

You’re in a Costco, pushing a cart. You have a vague sense, which is fading by the moment, that you’ve just arrived here from somewhere else, but you can’t recall where.

Everything is simultaneously disorienting and familiar. The bustle and din of a busy supermarket. The polished concrete floor and the towering orange pallet racks. An overwhelming physical abundance of food and retail goods, in colorful packaging. And people, everywhere.

This post is intended for a certain segment of the population, and after a few paragraphs you’ll know if it’s you (or someone you know).

Historically, I’ve had spectacular trouble getting normal, everyday things done: homework, chores, work projects, household maintenance, assigned reading, paperwork, personal goals, and setting the clocks back after a time change.

Nobody finds all of this stuff easy or matter-of-course. Life demands more than any of us can give. We each have to find a kind of equilibrium where we can tolerate ourselves, let some things drop, and get most of the important stuff done.

It’s been clear to me since childhood, though, that when it comes to the ability to meet those demands, the population exists on a bell curve, and I am on the left tail of it. I always marveled at how much normal, well-adjusted people get done. How quickly they dispatch an actionable thing – a form to fill out, an item to return — and how uncomplicated the question of doing it seems.

I don’t know how doing things feels to them, but to me it feels like I’m standing on a wobbly funhouse floor, with weights velcroed to my limbs and six different radio stations playing my in my brain.

The next time you’re walking down a well-trodden footpath through a wooded area, give a thought to the first person (or deer) who took that route.

Some determined being came through here when there was no path. They went straight into the woods. They didn’t circle around to try to find an easier way.

At any time you’re on a path, you can recreate the trailblazer’s ordeal by turning 90 degrees and walking straight into the messy, wet undergrowth that bounds the path now. If you do, you’ll immediately discover how much ease and comfort a path offers. From the first step, the dangers and costs of movement multiply.

For one thing, you aren’t sure where it’s safe to put your feet. You can easily roll an ankle or hook your foot on a low root, so you have to slow down and concentrate, feeling out each footfall.

When you’re worked up over some dilemma, talking about it with someone else can give you a whoosh of perspective, mostly because the other person’s mind isn’t stuck in a black cloud like yours is.

The overwhelmed mind tends to regard everything as bad. The optimistic and resourceful part, whatever that is, has gone offline.

Richard Carlson described this effect well in Don’t Sweat the Small Stuff:

“Someone who is in a good mood in the morning might love his wife, his job, and his car. He is probably optimistic about his future and grateful for his past. But by late afternoon, he claims he hates his job, thinks of his wife as a nuisance, thinks his car is a junker, and believes his career is going nowhere. If you ask him about his childhood while he’s in a low mood, he’ll probably tell you it was difficult. He will probably blame his parents for his current plight.”

Just as it’s still possible (though seldom necessary) to ride a horse, it is still possible to surf the internet. It’s a thrill not yet lost to time.

By “surfing the internet” I don’t just mean going online. I mean exploring the internet solely by following hyperlinks from page to page, with no clear destination except for that one wonderful, as-yet-unknown website that will amaze and enthrall you when you find it, the one that will seem like it’s been waiting for you your whole life and which you can’t get enough of.

To surf, you must begin on a normal website with outbound links, and avoid all the algorithm-driven thoroughfares (Reddit, YouTube, X, any “apps”) that direct most of today’s internet traffic. You also have to be on a real computer, not a phone. If you end up on social media, you’re no longer surfing.

Younger readers may not even know that the internet used to be made entirely of websites, created by human beings, connected only by hyperlinks. Hyperlinks served as signposts, hand-placed by other humans, to point fellow travelers to unique locations they would not otherwise have known about. There were no corporate-owned thoroughfares, just many pathways shooting off from each clearing, marked by these handmade signs, beckoning you onward to some other place in the wilderness.

A history buff friend of mine said that the art of medieval fencing was lost completely. At some point, the last person who really knew how to do it had died.

There are old treatises that describe the art, and people have learned a lot from them, starting historical fencing clubs and instructional YouTube channels. But embodied artforms like fencing can’t be translated entirely into books and then come out again intact. There are subtleties that can only be transmitted by a living teacher to a living student.

Much of this expertise will never be rediscovered, because nobody needs to get really good at sword fighting anymore. It’s a hobby – no one’s life or legacy depends on mastering this skill, and so the best of it, whatever it was, is gone.

I find this idea of lost knowledge haunting, and I think of it whenever go into Shopper’s Drug Mart, where the art of eye contact between cashier and customer seems to have been lost to time. No matter what you do, they just don’t look at you. If they look up at all, their gaze points off at nothing, somewhere to the side of your head, while they say thank you and give you your receipt without a glimmer of friendliness.

By the time you’re three or four years old, you’ve already learned the tremendous value of dishonesty.

Even if you were the one who unrolled all the toilet paper onto the floor, you know it’s possible for your parents to believe it was someone else, and that’s a better outcome for you. So you say you didn’t do it, hoping they adopt this false version of reality and never know the difference.

The truth is a useful and beautiful thing, but it easily comes in conflict with other interests, namely feeling safe from unwanted forms of attention, or getting others to do things for you.

Deception – or at least, putting truth second to other interests — is instinctive. I have a clear memory of being six years old, playing in the town pool with one of my friends. We were talking about how deep the water was, and he said that his dad could touch the bottom because he was seven feet tall. I said my dad could too, because he was eight feet tall.

Now, I didn’t actually know how tall my dad was, but I knew he probably wasn’t a whole foot taller than Wilt Chamberlain. Why did I say that? I guess felt I was being challenged in some way, and that it was important to counter my friend’s aggressive claim of father-height superiority. I didn’t feel like I was lying exactly. The accuracy of what I was saying just didn’t seem particularly important.