Intro
One Sunday, my nine-year-old daughter, Wren, was waiting for her friend to come over for an afternoon playdate. Now, when I say she was waiting for this friend, I don’t mean that she was, like, lounging around reading or jumping on the trampoline or sorting her Pokemon cards. No. In her typical hardcore style. She went out and literally paced back and forth in the front yard … back and forth … back and forth … with occasional breaks to come in and check the clock in the living room. Yeah … she took waiting seriously.
When I got a call from the friend’s parents at 1:40, twenty minutes before ETA, I knew we were in trouble.
Wren’s prospective playdate was having a tricky time completing his chores, the parents said. “There’s a chance we won’t make it … But, y’know, we might if he can pull it together. We’ll see how things go. We can’t make any guarantees. Maybe we’ll be there. I don’t know. We’ll text you.”
And then Wren ran in and checked the clock “17 minutes” and jogged back outside to pace in the front lawn.
Ugh … here goes.
Of course, when I broke the news, Wren melted in a wailing puddle. She screamed for me to, “Go away!” and spent the next ten minutes sobbing “I want my momma.”
When she finally, finally, tamed the wild horses of her disappointment enough to come to the living room and sit on the couch and let me rub her back, she asked between her sniffles. “Is he coming or not?”
“I don’t know, kiddo. I don’t think his family knows either.”
“I don’t like not knowing. It doesn’t feel good.”
“What if we start a project,” I suggested, “Maybe do some legos.” But she couldn’t even think of it. She was stuck in between. If she knew that her friend wasn’t coming, she could have gotten sad, gotten over it, and then gone on with her day. But instead, she spent the rest of the afternoon pacing, watching the clock, and waiting to see what happened.
Ch 1: An Ode to Changing Your Mind
In 1991, Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist nun, published a book called The Wisdom of No Escape–no escape, that is, from uncertainty. There is no answer key to life. All of us will regularly and inevitably get stuck “in between” with no clue about whether the playdate will happen. As Neil Degrasse Tyson likes to say, “the universe has no responsibility to make sense to us.” We’re just going to have to get used to it.
There are all kinds of uncertainties. Like Wren, we can be stuck with uncertain outcomes. For example, we can’t know whether we’ll get into the college of our dreams. Alternatively, we can be caught in ambiguities, like when the object of your crush might be flirting with you or might just be a nice and outgoing person. Or, we can be torn by indecision, like when you have two job offers at the same time, each with their own pros and cons, and one of them needs a decision by next Tuesday. I positively drowned in indecision during my twenties. I knew I had to choose some direction in life, some career or dream or ambition or life’s work, but every choice required that I kill off some other dream, so like Wren, I found myself pacing back and forth, entertaining one fantasy of the future after another without every really choosing–and unintentionally choosing the status quo by default. Perhaps the hardest uncertainty, though, is doubt–the kind that happens when something upends what we assumed to be true.
It can be really hard to change your mind. When the world doesn’t match up to our beliefs, it can feel a lot like our playdate has failed to materialize. It’s easy to get angry, to continually ask why, to call for momma, and to keep on pacing and looking at the clock waiting for the world to conform to our expectations instead of changing them. The more important the belief, the harder this struggle gets. And not just for the obvious reasons. We can probably all think of examples of people who found it hard to accept that they were wrong, and even harder to admit it. But being stuck in a belief isn’t just about stubbornness. It’s not just about accepting or admitting; it’s also about being able to see that you’re wrong at all. Human brains, for whatever reasons, are riddled with biases. We really don’t see or don’t trust evidence that contradicts what we want or what we expect. We reflexively justify what we’ve done.
As Wren said, not knowing doesn’t feel good. And that seems especially true of not knowing whether our beliefs and assumptions about the world hold water. Something there is in us that does not love the messy and the unsure, that wants it down and ironed out and squared away.
Who hasn’t just wished that the damned biopsy results would come back already or that the house sale would go through or that they would just please post the final exam grades? Even if the results are scary or disappointing, we’d rather have them just so that we could get on with things. Who hasn’t longed for someone to just tell us what to do. Or what is right.
I think about uncertainty a lot. In my recent episode on “the Apocalypse,” I explored how we find joy in an uncertain world?. But in today’s episode, I’d like to just take some time to appreciate doubt itself and the people who do it well. I deeply admire people like Pema Chodron who seem to have found ways to become “comfortable with uncertainty.” I emulate people who change their minds, even when it is hard. . Doubt may not be much fun, but we are better for it. So this is a love song, an ode, to questioning our beliefs, to people who are willing to change them, and to those among us who are able to pivot and get on with their days … even when the playdate we’ve expected all morning doesn’t materialize.
You’re listening to “I Heart This.”
Ch 2: Belief
Before I dive into doubt, however, I think it makes sense to talk about belief–what it is and how it works. Despite everything I’ve just said about the importance of changing one’s mind, I am not against beliefs. That’d be crazy. Without beliefs we’d have no way to navigate the world. We’d never know what to do. Picking out a loaf of bread at the supermarket would be an inscrutable enigma..
Lots of other animals, like spiders for example, probably don’t need to rely on beliefs at all. They arrive in the world with blueprints of intricate webs and the procedures for making them already mapped out inside their brains. Instinct makes them automatically good at the things they need to be good at. Animals with more complex brains, like humans, have instincts too, but we also have something more. If we want to do something complicated like weaving, we can learn how. In fact, learning has been such a successful strategy for us that we have to believe just to get by.
It’s easy to imagine a belief as an individual logical statement like, “1 + 1 = 2,” or “The sky is blue,” or “You should never get involved in a land war in Asia.” But in reality, beliefs hardly ever stand alone; rather, they’re almost always connected to other beliefs in complicated matrices. They can, for example, form procedures for how to do something or arguments for why something is right or so. But the most common and most powerful structure is story. As cognitive scientist Daniel Willingham says, story has a “privileged place” in our minds.
Our capacity to take the extravagantly complicated world and make sense of it by telling a story is one of the keys to humanity’s extraordinary success. Stories are particularly flexible. The ingredients are simple.They have characters, people we can identify with, who want things and do things and have things happen to them. They have a beginning, a middle, and an end. In stories, events are linked by cause and effect, and those linkages have personal meaning for us. Jesus died for your sins. Our forefathers brought forth upon this continent a new nation conceived in liberty. Brad left Jennifer for Angelina. I don’t think it’s too much of a stretch to say that our science, our politics, and our religions are just interconnected webs of stories.
And stories work. We invest in them because good ones really do predict how things will turn out, and guide us to effective choices. With Isaac Newton’s story about gravity, you can even guide your rocket to the moon, land it there, and return to tell the tale.
Stories also work in ways that are less tangible but no less real. They can inspire, convince, or provide solace. When I was young, the Christian story of the Catholic Church gave me profound comfort, purpose, and meaning. By all measures I had a comfortable, predictable childhood, sheltered from the uncertainties of the world. But I still found consolation in going to church.. As a Catholic, I always knew who was in charge. I knew where I stood. I knew what was right and wrong. Heck, I even knew the exact number of choirs of angels, (nine, by the way.). Sure, a trademarked brand of guilt that was passed out with the communion wafers. But I loved having someone to pray to who was always going to listen and who always had my best interests at heart. God was love. And love was something worth living for.
I love having something to believe in. I love having what science historian, Michael Shermer, calls a “believing brain.” I love the power that stories have to transport me, to inspire me, to give me a vision of my best self. If the alternative is to just run on genetic programming, I’ll choose self-determination, I’ll choose belief, every time.
Ch 3: The Semmelweis Reflex
But just as instinct makes fish vulnerable to the fisherman who carries a torch on the lake at night, our stories make us vulnerable too.
This happens in part because beliefs don’t just describe the world; they change how we perceive it. In The Hero with A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell retells the story of a young girl playing Hansel and Gretel with a trio of matchsticks. One for Hansel. One for Gretel. And one for the wicked witch. The girl is playing along for a while when she suddenly screams in fright. Her father runs to her asking her what’s wrong (probably thinking she’s set the couch on fire). But it isn’t the couch. Instead, the girl shouts, “Daddy! Daddy! Take the witch away! I can’t touch the witch!”
Anyone who has lived with a toddler knows that this isn’t that far-fetched. But this isn’t just a thing that happens to toddlers. All of us confound the match and the witch sometimes. European colonialists really see the inhabitants of colonized lands as sub-human. Kings and popes really do radiate power in the eyes of their subjects, even though they’re just regular people in funny hats. Hurricanes really become the wrath of an angry god or the purposeless consequence of a butterfly flapping depending on your story. When you expect a “bad day,” everything really does go wrong. When you are in love, the world really can’t be brighter.
I can’t think of a better story to illustrate this point than that ofIgnaz Sammelweis. In 1846, this young Hungarian doctor showed up for a new job in a maternity ward of Vienna General Hospital. Vienna General was a teaching hospital. Its campus was a nearly 200-year-old sprawling center of both treatment and research. And its maternity ward had a problem. Postpartum women and their newborn babies were dying in agony from a condition popularly known as childbed fever, and nobody knew why. Childbed fever was not uncommon. It affected women all over the world. But at the ward in Vienna General, childbed fever was epidemic. Women who knew its reputation would beg on their knees not to be admitted. Some gave birth in the streets, claiming to be on their way so they would still be eligible for benefits without having to step foot in the ward. In 1846, about one in ten mothers who went through the clinic died.
As part of a new scientific movement in medicine, Sammelwies began looking for something that might shed some light on the childbed fever epidemic. He didn’t have to go far. On the hospital’s campus was another maternity ward. This one wasn’t staffed by doctors, but by midwives, women who hadn’t received formal medical training, but who helped deliver babies in the same way that midwives had for millenia. The midwifery ward was in the same climate, in the same community, with the same clientele. It would be the perfect comparison to his own.
Being a numbers guy, Sammelweis started gathering data from both clinics, and a staggering pattern emerged. Mothers in the medical clinic, the one staffed by doctors, died at nearly five times the rate as the ones in the midwifery clinic. Five times!
What the heck? What was different? If he could find out, and if it was something he could replicate, he could save dozens of lives. Husbands wouldn’t watch their wives die. Children wouldn’t lose their mothers. Sammelweiss meticulously documented every variable he could. Then he set out to systematically investigate each one. It wasn’t the climate. It wasn’t the clientele. It wasn’t crowding. If anything, the midwives’ ward was more crowded. The midwives’ patients gave birth in different positions, so he tried adjusting the birthing positions in his own ward, but that had no effect. He even tweaked the habits of the visiting priest who came to minister last rights to the dead and dying.
After month’s of investigation, nothing had worked.
Frustrated and haunted by the deaths of the women and babies under his care, Sammelweis took a leave. He went on vacation to Venice hoping to find some respite in the city’s timeless art, and maybe a fresh perspective to the problem. But upon his return, he was met with tragic news. His friend and colleague, the pathologist, Jakob Kolletschka had died. A student had accidentally cut Jakob’s finger with a scalpel during an autopsy. Over the next few days, Jakob contracted a fever and died in great pain.
An autopsy of Jakob’s body revealed that he’d died from widespread inflammation that had affected his lymphatic system, his veins, the pleura of his lungs, the pericardium around his heart, the lining of his abdominal cavity, and the meninges, the covering of the brain and spinal cord, a condition that most people know as meningitis. Sammelweis was distraught, but even in his grief, he recognized a pattern in Jakob’s symptoms. They were almost exactly the same as childbed fever. Jakob didn’t even work in a maternity ward.
And once Semmelweis saw this, he realized that he’d missed a key difference between the the doctors’ maternity ward and the midwives.’ Doctors performed autopsies. And in a teaching hospital, they performed them with their students all the time. A doctor delivering a baby often had had his hands in a cadaver just hours or even minutes before. Could it be something about the cadavers that caused the disease? What if tiny little bits, so small that they’d be invisible, remained on the doctors’ hands and instruments, only to be transferred to the unfortunate mothers while they were examined during birth? Maybe these little bits were what caused the fever?
It took Semmelweis two months to work out a hygiene procedure. He instituted it in the ward in mid-May of 1847. All the staff in the maternity ward carefully washed their hands. He had them sterilize their instruments by soaking them in a chlorine solution. The mortality rate in April had been over 18%, almost one in five patients. In June, July, and August, the average mortality rate was below 2%. And then, for the first time in the ward’s history, a month went by when no one died of childbed fever at all. All because of the washing of hands.
I tell you this story because … because what a triumph! What a moment for all of humankind! Because it needs to be more widely known. But also because of what it says about belief and doubt. In some ways Sammelweis’s breakthrough was the result of his beliefs. He believed in gathering data and testing ideas. He believes that ordinary people, given the right evidence, can figure stuff out about how the world works, and that they can solve problems.
But in other ways, Sammelweis’s breakthrough happened in spite of what he believed. He didn’t believe in germ theory because in 1847, it didn’t exist. Instead, Sammelweis had to overcome, or at least ignore, the prevailing stories of the causes of disease at the time, namely, that disease was caused by an imbalance of different fluids in the body or exposure to poisons in the air. He also had to let go of beliefs about the superiority of his medical profession over the traditional practices of midwives and about childbed fever being a different disease than the one that affected a man whose cut was exposed to a corpse. For this one insight, Sammelweis had to change his mind about all kinds of things.
But this story is also notable for the minds that didn’t change. Many of Sammelweis’s colleagues were not so flexible. Despite dramatic results and the evangelical testimony of his students, Sammelweis’s recommendations were vehemently rejected by Europe’s medical community, and Sammelweis himself was treated like a crackpot. His book on the subject was witheringly criticized. What exactly, his colleagues wanted to know, was being transferred from the morgue to the birthing room? How could something in such trace quantities cause such system-wide illness? Not even the world’s most potent toxins could do that. Perhaps the sting of admitting that it was the hands of doctor’s themselves that caused the deaths of these women was too great. So instead of handwashing, most doctors continued to practice as usual, and then treat the mothers who contracted childbed fever with enemas and bloodletting.
For his part, Sammelweis became increasingly indignant and hostile. As far as he was concerned, his fellow physicians were responsible for thousands of preventable deaths. He pulled no punches telling them so. In 1865, he had a kind of breakdown, the exact nature of which isn’t clear. His family prevailed upon a doctor to take him to an asylum, under the pretense of observing its medical practice, but with the true intention of having him admitted as a patient. When Sammelweis discovered the ruse, he resisted. The guards beat him and restrained him in a straightjacket. In the fight Sammelweis injured his hand. The wound got infected. Two weeks later he died. The doctors attributed his death to blood poisoning. Today, we would recognize it as a systemic bacterial infection, basically the same disease that Sammelweis had spent his life trying to prevent.
With the benefit of hindsight, it is easy to paint the doctors of the medical establishment who ridiculed Sammelweis’s ideas as stubborn boors, lashing out at anything that they didn’t understand. And that’s probably true for some of them. But I’d bet that other doctors honestly believed that they were doing the right thing. In an age plagued even more by predatory and pseudoscientific medical woo than our own, scalding your instruments in chlorine, a known poison, could have easily seemed like the work of a nineteenth-century Doctor Oz. Something that needed to be refuted to protect an overly credulous public. Changing your mind is hard, because you are often the person least likely to recognize that it needs to be changed.
But that’s not the end of the story. Some doctors did espouse Semmelweis’s hygiene protocols. In the next few decades, the work of Louis Pasteur and Joseph Lister helped to cement a new theory of germs that explained why Sammelweis’s protocols worked. Vaccinations prevented terrible diseases. Pasteurization made foods safer and last longer. Joseph Lister reintroduced the idea of antiseptic protocols during surgery and sterilizing implements became widespread. Little by little, new approaches made medecine safer. Doctors would change out of their street clothes and into scrubs, tools would be autoclaved, sterile dressings were invented, face masks were used, the number of people in the operating theater was reduced. And, of course, doctors washed and scrubbed their hands.
It would be years before handwashing by surgeons and doctors became commonplace. It would be a century before it became public practice. But it did! In that century, it wasn’t just doctors who changed their minds, it was humanity. Today, handwashing is still public health’s greatest tool. It saves millions of lives each year. And in 2022, for the first time in the history of the world, three-quarters of the world’s population had access to basic hygiene. It is hard to be thankful for deaths that don’t happen. It is hard to see all of kids who haven’t lost parents, or the families that haven’t been devastated by the loss of a child. But there are so many! Maybe even you. These uncounted millions live because people changed their minds.
There are countless stories like this. But I chose this one because it is so iconic, both for the beliefs that were changed and the beliefs that weren’t. Today, some even call the tendency to reject evidence that contradicts current beliefs the Semmelweis reflex, as if it were an unconscious, uncontrollable reaction.
And there is clearly something unconscious about it. Sometimes we clearly know that there might be evidence to contradict our beliefs and still turn away. Someone once told me not to tell them about the labor practices of a clothes manufacturer because she didn’t want to feel guilty. Another friend once said about a political conversation, “Let’s not talk about this. I don’t want to change my mind.” Or the religiously minded person who is afraid of ideas that might “undermine their faith.”
But I don’t think this kind of willful ignorance is typical. Teachers, people whose job it is to literally change minds, see this every day. In the mid-1980s, the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics produced a 20-minute documentary video, called “A Private Universe” about this very thing. It opened with a series of interviews with recent Harvard graduates still in their caps and gowns. The interviewers ask them to explain what caused seasons and the phases of the moon, things regularly taught in middle school. It’s pretty painful for this science teacher to listen to them blaze confidently through explanations based on common misconceptions.
In the second half of the video, the researchers interview 9th graders who have just learned about those same concepts. But even those who had exemplary scores on their tests fell back to naive and sometimes convoluted ideas when asked to explain in more detail. We don’t usually fail to change our minds because we’re stubborn. We fail because it’s hard to do. Maybe clinging to our old ideas actually is a reflex.
The costs of this reflex aren’t always so high as in the case of medical hygiene, but our inability to change our minds causes us to miss opportunities, persist in damaging habits, repeat mistakes, and fail to adapt. In his book Think Again, Adam Grant tells the story of how the creator of the BlackBerry smartphone just could not get over the idea of having a keyboard on his smartphones instead of a touchscreen, and watched his company’s share of the market drop from 50% to less than 1% in just five years. People ignore evacuation warnings during hurricanes despite the best efforts of officials. In every major storm, you can find them telling news anchors that sticking it out last time wasn’t so bad. True believers stick with the doomsday cult even after the world doesn’t end as predicted. They just wait for their prophets to revise the date of the Rapture.
I don’t know why it’s so hard for people to change their ideas, but the Sammelwies reflex affects all of us. We rationalize. We get defensive. We ignore or undersell the ideas that contradict what we want or what we expect. It is so easy to get stuck in beliefs that aren’t serving us, it’s kind of a miracle that we end up changing at all.
Ch 4: Skepticism–Check Your Blind Spots or Why I’m Grateful for Doubt
I get stuck in the Sammelweis reflex all the time. Well into my first year as a science teacher, I carried around deep-seated misunderstandings of Newton’s Laws of motion. I still feel a sting of embarrassment when I remember the mitigation I had to do after one particularly botched lesson. And then there’s are those awful moments when I’m falling asleep and into my head pop these memories of Laura’s senior prom, when I just could not let go of my ideas about what constituted danceable music and consigned my date to spending most of the evening sitting at a table instead of on the dance floor. I spent years chastising myself for cowardice and lack of conviction because I hadn’t followed through on my youthful dreams of living in the wilderness. Suffice it to say that I don’t have the secret to flexible thinking.
I am grateful for people like Ignaz Sammelweis or Charles Darwin or Rosa Parks who serve as heroes of doubt and who have precipitated the changing of all of our minds. But I also want to express my thanks for the wise teachers who have shown me strategies for freeing myself from beliefs that have outlived their utility. Many of those wise teachers were scientists. This makes sense. Science is, after all, systematic about dismantling ideas that don’t match the evidence. And in a large part, this episode is a thank you note both to the science I have learned and to the people who have helped me learn to use it.
One of those teachers was a forest ecologist that I worked with in graduate school named Mark Lapin. I remember one assignment on a field trip into the woods when he asked us to look around and describe what we observed. People said things like “It looks like there’s a history of fire at this site.” And the professor would say, “That’s not an observation.” So someone else would say, “Based on the species here, I’d say the soil here is pretty rich.” And he would say the same thing. “Not an observation.” After a couple more such contributions, Mark shook his head. “It’s really hard to separate observation from interpretation, but you’ve got to if you’re going to think scientifically. There is a stone wall. That’s an observation. There are red maples here. That’s an observation. Observation is just what you see–just what you sense–without any extrapolation from you. That’s what evidence is.”
Mark taught me that before I could question an idea, I had to recognize that I was having one. I had to see the interpretations I was making for what they were.
Another teacher was Carl Sagan, whose book Science as a Candle in the Dark, was the first systematic and comprehensible explanation I’d encountered for how science worked and what made it so powerful. Contrary to what I thought, science wasn’t there to prove things. It was there to disprove. Carl taught me how science is brutal with ideas. It is a doubt machine. It doubts everything. Systematically and on purpose. “It is not perfect. It can be misused. It is only a tool. But it is by far the best tool we have, self-correcting, ongoing, applicable to everything. It has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths; all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised. We must understand the Cosmos as it is and not confuse how it is with how we wish it to be. The obvious is sometimes false; the unexpected is sometimes true.”
The scientific ideas that I learned in school weren’t proven. They were just the last ideas standing after years, sometimes centuries of abuse, by some of the world’s cleverest minds. This was why biologists rolled their eyes when people said things like, “Well, after all, evolution is just a theory.” To earn the title of theory, the idea of natural selection has been consistent with every observation of every biologist for the past one hundred and sixty years.
Carl taught me that because I couldn’t see my own stuckness, to seek out other people who could. To listen to the people on “the other side” and see what I could learn from them. He taught me to follow up my reading of any convincing book or blog post or video, with another expressing a different view.
But maybe the most potent counsel I received came from innovative science teachers working to better help students understand the nature of science. I’m especially indebted to Roger Tobin, a physicist from Tufts, who helped me to understand how scientific ideas emerge only in the interplay between storytelling and skepticism, between belief and doubt. And that I needed to let my students wrestle with both. How does a scientific model come about? We come up with stories, see what they can explain, and when they don’t work, we change them. or add to them, or in some rare cases, we scrap them altogether. Our stories, our models, our beliefs can evolve.
When I look at it like that, I think a lot less about the rightness or wrongness of ideas. Wrongness isn’t really a problem. All of my ideas are wrong. They’ll all break down at some point because I am telling simple stories to make sense of a complicated world. But in another sense, none of them are wrong because they’re all works in progress. Like Rumi says, “Out beyond rightdoing and wrongdoing there is a field, I’ll meet you there.” In a third sense, rightness and wrongness aren’t even the point. We come up with scientific models for the same reason that we come up with all beliefs–because they are useful. No scientist nowadays seriously believes that the stars are attached to a rotating celestial sphere, but we still talk about stars like that because it is really useful for finding your way around the night sky. Modern chemists don’t think that electrons orbit an atomic nucleus like planets. But students in high school still spend most of their chemistry class thinking about electrons this way because you can use that idea to predict which substances will react and how. Einstein showed that Newton’s ideas about gravity break down, but we still teach Newton’s Laws because they work most of the time.
All of these lessons have let me be more playful and open and curious. And, I think, somewhat better at changing my mind. It took a long time and lots of practice for me to really internalize these lessons, and looking back now I see how I only acquired them because dozen of teachers invested the time and care over decades to help me get there. They are part of a movement. All over the world, people like them champion free discourse and compassionate listening in a world of ideologies. The traditions of critical thinking and science only exist because they pass it on from generation to generation, in the hopes that people will continue to revise and change our most cherished ideas and get ever closer to a truth that we will probably never reach.
Chapter 5: Faith
So where does all this leave us? I think it will always be hard for doubt to get the appreciation it is due. It’s not sexy. It doesn’t inspire. People will probably always want leaders who exude confidence, leaders who hold to their beliefs with integrity.
But doubt has an integrity of its own. There is a story, perhaps apocryphal, of Gandhi’s lieutenants coming to him outraged. Gandhi had canceled a march of protest against the British because he feared that protest would erupt into violence. His fellow leaders demanded an explanation. “People have left their work and traveled great distances to be here. You can’t stop now.” and Gandhi responded, “I am only human. My understanding changes day to day. My commitment is to truth and not consistency.”
In my past, I used to think of doubt and faith as opposites, in the same way that I imagined that courage was the opposite of fear. But not anymore. Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It is the willingness to do what is necessary despite fear. Faith, I now think, is the same. The world will always be uncertain. We will never know for sure whether the playdate will happen. But we can continue to act even as our beliefs unravel, even as our minds change. I can choose to step forward for love and justice even though my understanding of those things will never quite be perfect.
When my first daughter was born, I decided to write her a book. A novel. Partly, it seemed like a fun thing to do. Partly it seemed like a way to pass on what I had learned about the world and to share my vision of what life could be like. My protagonist, Hope, was a fourteen-year-old girl who basically lived out my own fantasy of what I’d wished my own life could have been. Her parents raised her in the woods and trained her to survive, to fend for herself, to be uncompromisingly free. Hope could track the coyotes across bare rock, and disappear into the shadows. She could tell, by listening to the birds, where the deer were. She was everything I wanted to be. And I think I created her in an attempt to show my own daughter how beautiful my vision of living wild was. I wanted to show her that civilization was flawed, but that humans could choose to live with integrity and independence by eschewing it.
In my story, Hope was sent to live in suburban Connecticut against her wishes and forced to reckon with the society that I saw as so flawed. And then something surprising happened–something surprising even to me. As I had introduced characters who would become Hope’s friends, I think I expected them to become Hope’s disciples–people who would follow her away from civilization to live wild and free. Instead, these new characters, seemingly without my permission, began to give voice to all kinds of reasons to stay in the civilized world. It was only after months of writing that I realized that those reasons were my own.
And I began to see that Hope herself was torn between living free and alone or living in society bound to the people that she loved. And then, I realized that this book wasn’t for Eva. It was for me. This was the choice that I’d had to make when I’d started my family. And I had chosen civilization. I had chosen people over principles. I had chosen Laura and the children that we’d had together. All this time I’d been angry with myself for my failures to stick to my convictions, for my lack of
perseverance. But all I’d done was chosen love. And that wasn’t a bad choice.
My doubt wasn’t a failing. It was a virtue. As Richard Feynman put it, “ In order to make progress, one must leave the door to the unknown ajar.” And that is a much more interesting way to live. To me, that sounds like doubt and faith all at once.
Hidden Track:
To Say It Simple is to Lie
Electrons orbit the nucleus.
All you need is love.
The no outlet sign on Town Farm Road.
To say it simple is to lie.
The road does go on
if you have a disregard for convention
and the right wheels.
There are rocks, sure.
But what way worth going
lacks them.
Mountain bikers
in their spandex
know the way through.
Our Russian neighbors
come with their basket
of mushrooms.
And late nights in June
the young bucks
pull their trucks from the mud
with winches and with Budweiser.
My students complain
that their teachers lied to them
when I tell them
about electron clouds
or that the Earth
does not
circle the sun
but ellipses
and at varying
speed
or that nothing
ever touches.
“Yes,” I say,
“but those are lies
of love.
They were all you were
ready for,
at the time.”
To say it simple is to lie.
Even this.
Light is a wave,
a particle,
both, sometimes.
It depends
on how you look,
even though it shouldn’t.
I tell them,
“One lie leads
to the next.
It is the only
way
we can get on.
These lies
are a railing
that guide you up the stairs
in the dark.
They are headlights
illuminating the way
for the Budweiser boys
through the fog
out on Town Farm Road
.”
This at least is true.
There is no outlet.
No matter how far down the track you go.
Even to Westminster.
There is no thing
that we can say
and finally be true.
I am the Way, the Truth, the Light.
The stars are fixed.
I think, therefore I am.
There is no outlet to Town Farm Road.
No denying … that road is a doozie.
Sometimes things are true enough.