The basic attitude in the air in the West is: “Go and get it.” Whoever wants to go and get it, can. This premise is taken as a given: Everyone has the same opportunities, everyone has the same potential, the same smarts, the same possibilities; the chances are equal and open to everyone. “You can do it just like everybody else; you have the intelligence, you are a human being, you can shape your own success; take it into your own hands.” We hear this said, but what is the reality? Those who are capable go happily along and of course are perfectly fine. For them, there is probably no better system than this materialistic society. But it can be very painful for those who cannot face up to life so aggressively. They feel incapacitated somewhere deep inside, as if they are not complete human beings. Instead they need to hear, “You can still do something. You can create more merit, you can make pure aspirations.”
…who cannot face up to life so aggressively, or who are not extroverts, or who are not capable of feigning happiness when they do not feel happy, or who sink to depths instead of skipping across the surface.
I was horrified to learn that introversion has been proposed for inclusion in the DSM-5, and began filing away fantasies about future flight to Finland.
I have been told, and I tell myself, that there is important work for the quiet, the still, the sensitive, the intuitive to do. That I should think more about “valuable differences” than about “alien traits.” But don’t underestimate the difficulty of out-shouting the messages of faster, louder, more that ring from every direction.
I feel lucky to have found work in a library, a place of relative stillness and reserve. A place where a number of colleagues seem as introverted as I am, if not more. But even a week working at the library wipes me out, and I often cling to my weekends as small solitary retreats.
Yesterday I spent several hours observing and caring for a small patch of ground: clearing leaf litter from nascent patches of moss, separating pebbles from soil, noting the directions of water flow from the patterns of erosion, digging with my hands. The closer you look, the more dizzying the array of life as it unfolds. It was good and comforting. Somewhere in there, I remembered this poem:
There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who prey upon them with IBM eyes
And sell their hearts and guts for martinis at noon.
There are men too gentle for a savage world
Who dream instead of snow and children and Halloween
And wonder if the leaves will change their color soon.There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who anoint them for burial with greedy claws
And murder them for a merchant’s profit and gain.
There are men too gentle for a corporate world
Who dream instead of candied apples and ferris wheels
And pause to hear the distant whistle of a train.There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who devour them with eager appetite and search
For other men to prey upon and suck their childhood dry.
There are men too gentle for an accountant’s world
Who dream instead of Easter eggs and fragrant grass
And search for beauty in the mystery of the sky.There are men too gentle to live among wolves
Who toss them like a lost and wounded dove.
Such gentle men are lonely in a merchant’s world,
Unless they have a gentle one to love.–James Kavanaugh