Picking Up Napkins and Other Things That Upset the Applecart

Yesterday I was crossing the street and observed a gust of wind snatch up a bajillion Starbucks napkins, confetti-ing (read: littering) them along my path ahead. It was actually pretty for a minute, all those recycled-brown rectangles fluttering around airborne. But, like all wild things, it had to come to an end, and they became grounded.

I was then forced to make a choice: to leave them in my fast-paced wake or to stop and give Mother Earth a little nudge in the right direction.

You shoulda seen me dancing all over the road, alternating between hand plucking and foot-stomping the little buggers. After one multiple-stomp attempt to catch a single one (it mattered to THAT starfish), I earned a driver's reluctant grin (must've been a Charlie Chapman fan).

Do you ever get deep about napkins?

You bet your mother lovin napkins I do!

I immediately went down this thought train:

We sometimes unnecessarily take responsibility for that for which we are not responsible.

Sometimes when someone does something wrong, that someone is unnecessarily spared the consequence... 



And then, it's converse, this:

We sometimes unnecesarily share the benefit of having been responsible with those who didn't participate in earning it.

Sometimes when someone does something right, that someone unnecessarily shares the reward...

What came to mind for that one was when we went to Disney Land this past Fall and did the right thing by arriving an hour ahead of the 4:00pm afternoon parade in order to reserve front-row seats on the street's curb. We thought it through. We planned accordingly. We did the work. As it were, there were two reasons for subsets of our party to leave and come back (#1 potty, #2 ice cream if you must know) prior to the parade's start and around the time the crowd was thickening.

Each time someone asked if the gaps left behind by our temporarily absent tooshes were available for the taking, I hated having to say NOPE.

Finally, I collapsed. A young family who had positioned themselves behind us (and whose kids - even standing up - would not be able to see well over our sitting-down bodies) seemed like the perfect peeps to squeeze into our space. I didn't swap our spots for theirs. Ours were just made smaller; we made room.

Even though our actions rightfully justified our initial place and theirs theirs.

Now, I am under no illusion that we are saints for having shared a parade-side curb at Disneyland with teensy children.

I mean, now that it's in print, it sounds a little more like just behaving like decent humans.

I mention this story - rather - because not everyone in our party was in agreement with this decision (based on body language exclusively) and, at the time, it got me thinking about the same thing the recent napkin moment did:

Much of the time, there is a thinner thread connecting cause and effect than we like to think.

Because, here's what we like to think about our human behavior:

Cause                                           thick solid line                                       Effect

Degree of Effort                          thick solid line                            Degree of Achievement

Degree of Work                           thick solid line                             Degree of Success

Action                                           thick solid line                                  Outcome


It's sorta a human thing, really.

It's why, if we're going down the Bible road (and you know I love me some Christian anecdotes), the dudes and dudettes (ok, it was just dudes... the Disciples as it were) who noticed the blind man drilled Jesus about what this man's parents one generation up had done such that God would make him sightless.

We Homo sapiens like to explain things. We like correlations. We like control. We like to know what to expect. We like certainty. We like concrete. We really, really love thick solid lines.

When I took statistics in college, I was fascinated by it. A layman's introduction to statistics is as follows: correlations between one set of data and another is rated by a "correlation coefficient," a value that ranges from negative one to one. If you're trying to connect two variables to one another (smoking and lung cancer, lets say, or exercise and heart disease), what you DON'T want is a 0. A correlation of zero means your research has led you to nada conclusions, you flunked. What you'd love is to get a -1 or a 1. A perfect negative correlation (as one variable increases, the other decreases or vice versa) or a perfect positive one (both variable increase/decrease in tandem).

But the truth in statistics and in life is that perfect correlations are fairly elusive.

Our role in this life: There is a thread. Oh, yes. There's a thread, a dotted line, a rational-clue-based scavenger hunt that makes all the junk that happens in life somehow connect to how we conduct ourselves. We set shit in motion, we do. Good luck, as they say, does follow hard work around. Human behavior matters.

Otherwise, every motivational poster made by humankind can be shredded. Coaches and teachers can retire. Total chaos would reign. Nothing would mean anything.

The best way to look at ourselves?

I say this: Recognize that most of where our participation in life meets life's actual play-out is, correlation coefficient speaking, about a ± 0.5.

This both ruffles the feathers of my self importance (i.e. pisses me off) and makes me feel completely and totally good (i.e. relieved).

I think we'd all be a lot more healthy if we viewed things with this ± 0.5 mentality. Cuz when I spend time with people operating under the ± 1.0 mentality, accompanying it seems to be a lot of harshness, their views towards people specifically. Actually, their views about their Source too. And, furthermore, most seem to be pretty on top of life at the time of this ± 1.0 mentality. (Goes something like this: I worked hard, I paid the price, I was responsible. This was earned.)

I ask this: Would a ± 1.0 type person pick up napkins that he didn't drop? Would she make room for someone who didn't do anything to receive it?

As a ± 0.5 thinker, I almost look for ways to make the apple cart teeter. It's fun-in-a-naughty way, really. When I find that space that's untouched by statistics...that space when it can go the expected way or not... that space where the element of surprise can affect the ho-hum assumptions about what is deserved or undeserved...

That space can be rather magical.

And here's how you know: People's response to it.

When the magic of grace fills a space that otherwise would be absolute, people show you the magic:

You get grins.

You get tense shoulders dropped.

You get laughter.

You get tight jaws loosened.

You get a glimpse of playfulness.

You get an actual affect, a change in the energy.


I call it good-will naughtiness...


We sometimes unnecessarily take responsibility for that for which we are not responsible.

Sometimes when someone does something wrong, that someone is unnecessarily spared the consequence.

MAGIC

We sometimes unnecessarily share the benefit of having been responsible with those who didn't participate in earning it.

Sometimes when someone does something right, that someone unnecessarily shares the reward.

MAGIC

This magic is called good-will naughtiness... And I'd like for all of us to have a little more of it.