“When we wish to correct with advantage, and to show another that he errs, we must notice from what side he views the matter, for on that side it is usually true; admit that truth to him, but reveal to him the side on which it is false. He is satisfied with that, for he sees that he was not mistaken, and that he only failed to see all sides. No one is offended at not seeing everything […].” -Blaise Pascal, Pensées

                I’ve been wrong a lot. My favorite example, for sheer style, was an argument in college. I’d heard people talk about a passage in the Torah, so I repeated as fact the little I could remember. This guy said, “That’s not right at all.” He quoted the Hebrew in question (which I couldn’t do), translated the Hebrew (which I couldn’t do), discussed the difficulty in translating a few of the key words (which I–you get it), mentioned some of the noteworthy commentaries written on that passage, and told me I was an idiot. Six months later I was ready to admire how completely he demolished me. We actually became friends. At the time, in front of the people watching, I got defensive.
                I’m not proud of that. I acted like an insecure, posturing jerk, probably because part of me is an insecure posturing jerk. I try to acknowledge that part and recognize him, so he doesn’t get the mic too often. He does help me understand some things. I’ve heard of psych research suggesting that, if you want to change someone’s mind, presenting them with facts that go against their foundational beliefs usually doesn’t work. In fact, it usually makes them cling to ‘their side’ even more. It’s easy to feel like people who do that must be morons, madmen, or egomaniacs, until I remember that I’ve done the same thing…
                The first lesson here we can learn from The Oatmeal: practice getting less defensive. The second lesson, I think, comes from Pascal. If you want to convince someone (he says), don’t start by telling them they’re wrong. Start by looking at the issue from their side. If they’re convinced they’re right, they’re probably right about something. Find that something, down in the roots of their perspective, and point it out to them. Tell them it’s important. Tell them they’re right. Then–then–there’s an opening for you to say, “But what do you think of this other side.”
                In that Oatmeal article, I looked at some arguments I had with my father about gun control. They got loud. They got angry. They didn’t get anywhere. Looking back, I realize that I missed what was important to him. In his mind, our conversation was about individual responsibility. In my mind, our conversation was about the safety of a community. Those are both important, but instead of seeing the roots of each other’s argument, we kept hitting each other with the branches.
If you start with, “You’re wrong,” most of us feel like you’re attacking the ideal we hold dear. Responsibility. Safety. Honor. Big things like that, big things we’ll rush to defend. If you start with, “Here, you’re right,” then you give our ideal its moment. After that, I’m ready to consider that I might have missed something else. Another conflicting ideal, maybe. (Of course freedom of speech is important; not yelling “fire” in that infamous crowded theater is important, too). I might have gotten the roots right, but twisted around the plant above them. I might’ve gotten stuck on one idea without noticing some others. All of us have seen something. None of us have seen everything.
                So if you want to to change someone’s mind, Pascal reminds us, start by looking for how they’re right.

                “Freedom is an illusion. It always comes at a price.”
                                -Jonathan Stroud, The Amulet of Samarkand

                I clearly remember the first time someone got me to question freedom as an ideal. It freaked me out. I’d grown up watching Westerns; Huckleberry Finn still lounged somewhere nearby, smoking when he wanted to smoke, fishing when he wanted to fish. Then someone looked into my head, saw the picture of a homestead where each man (and yeah, it was a man) was sovereign over all he saw, and said, “That’s not free. That’s lonely.”
                In the next years, I tried to adjust my freedom-loving worldview so that it could make room for the swell of whatever I’d felt in that wild, stormy moment. “Maybe,” I thought, “Maybe we’re only free with support; when I raise my walls around a little patch of ground, I don’t have friends, family, I don’t have connection, so the freedom to do as I please isn’t freedom at all. It’s just emptiness. Maybe freedom is the openness in which there’s love.” I think there’s something to that, but I also know I was trying to rework my definitions so that I had to change as little as possible. I didn’t want to accept that I might have picked ideals that led to someplace I didn’t want to go. And I might have. That’s something we do.
                What if freedom isn’t what I’m after? What if, truth be told, I choose something else–purpose, or compassion, or respect, or growth, or engagement, or the hum of a forest filled with countless insects doing their insect thing? What if, as Stroud says, freedom as an absolute doesn’t even make sense? Huckleberry can smoke, but the smoke will do what smoke does to his lungs. He can fish, but if there are enough Huckleberries who aren’t careful about it, they’ll get rid of all the fish. There’s always a price.
                I don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t know anyone else who has this living thing 100% figured out. With that in mind, freedom’s important because it lets each of us flail around while we try to figure out how to help, and where we’re going. But that says freedom is part of our path forward; it doesn’t say freedom is the land we’re walking to. And I’m not sure it is. I’ve never felt more sure of the world than when I was caring for my little niece, and she took every ounce of concentration I had. Standing there (well, running, actually; and sitting and holding and swinging and spinning around), I wasn’t free to do as I pleased. But I want to go back.
                To put the same thought in a different place, it’s important to me that I’m free to teach my classes in the way I want. But I don’t teach classes to protect my freedom to teach however I want. I teach to try and help my students learn.

                “He could not speak for Mama without commanding how he himself was to be looked upon.” -Saul Bellow, The Adventures of Augie March

                It’s surprising, and hard to remember, and wonderful that most of what happens–almost everything that happens, really–is not about me. It’s so easy to forget that. When I’m with my students, it’s easy to see what they learn and believe as a reflection of my (in)abilities as a teacher. When I’m with my little brother, it’s easy to see his actions as a commentary on the kind of big brother I am. In my little brat’s mind, it’s easy to think that I’m the only one in the whole wide world, and everything that’s happening is happening to me.
                In The Adventures, Simon puts his aging, almost-blind mother in a retirement home. Bored, she asks for a job, and starts putting together political pins for an upcoming election. When Simon sees her working with her hands, he explodes. He grew up poor, but he married rich and has made it rich, and he wants everyone to know that his mother doesn’t need to work with her hands. It doesn’t matter that she wants to. It matters that he’s important, and if they don’t treat her this certain way, they’re not recognizing his importance.
                We hurt the ones we love, when we look at them the way Simon looks at his mother. We turn what could have been our support into a kind of entrapment. We turn our love into our self-regard. We can even lie to ourselves, tell ourselves it’s for their good–because they need to learn. Because we can decide better. I know a father who chose his son’s college, not by where the boy could learn, but by where the father could brag about.
                We hurt ourselves, too. Simon loses his mother. He steals her from himself. Throughout the book, he steals away everyone he loves: his brother, his wife, his mistress. He makes them all into reflections of how he should be viewed (as the man who provides; as the man who made it rich; as the man who came from nothing; as the man who can have anyone and anything) and lives alone in the middle of all of them.
                I don’t want to do that. I want to have my brother, and my students, and my friends. I want them to be different. I want to live in a world of not-mes. In whatever ways I can, I want to protect that world for you.

                “People think they are coming to me for advice, but really they come to me for permission. If you want to do something, do it.”
                -Mampanyin, a wise woman in Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing

                The man Mampanyin’s talking to isn’t thinking about some crazy, scatterbrained scheme: he’s thinking about the hurts around him, and about how to make his little corner of the world a little better. He’s been thinking for a long time. And he has an idea. “If you want to do something,” she says, “do it.”
                I think Mampanyin may be right: most of what we need from the wisewomen of our lives is permission. Permission to try: to start working with what’s in front of us. Permission to get hurt. Permission to believe, and hope, and be disappointed, and cry, and hope again. Permission to not know everything, and to learn.
                That reminds me of another story. In the movie, Moana gets caught between the call she hears toward the open sea, and her father’s insistence that she stay on their island. When the waves frighten her, when they hurt her, she makes a sudden, harsh decision: it’s time to let go of the open sea. It’s time to silence that part of her heart. Moana expects her grandmother to stop her, to talk her out of it, but grandmother just says, “Okay.” Grandmother wades into the ocean, dancing. Somehow Moana can’t walk away. Turning back, she asks,
                “Is there something you want to tell me?”
                Grandmother smiles.
                “Is there something you want to hear?”
                Moana knew that the decision she’d just made couldn’t be right. She knew that giving up her heart, giving up the call toward the ocean, would be giving up too much. She knew all that. Sometimes it hurt to know it. Sometimes she didn’t know how to carry it–but all of it was hers, and in her heart of hearts, she was finding her way already. That’s way she asked her grandmother to stop her. That’s why she said, “Is there something you want to tell me?”
                For Moana, the something she had to hear was the story of her ancestors. It was the knowledge that she wasn’t betraying her people, but following them in a way that was also leading them. It was permission to be who she was, and give the gifts she had. Lately I’ve been thinking about that. I’ve been wondering about these two wisewomen. I think we can all go to Mampanyin. I think Grandmother hears you. She smiles. She asks,
                “Is there something you want to hear?”

                When I was a student at Amherst, I recited Richard Wilbur’s “The Ride” at a funeral.  A few months later I was in Professor Wilbur’s office. I almost didn’t mention what I’d done. Saying the poem had been important to me, it had been important, I hope, to the deceased man’s family, but it didn’t seem like it would be that important to Wilbur. His poems had already brought inspiration around the world. What was one more anecdote from a silly college student?

                In the end I told him anyway. Wilbur had been letting his thoughts drift, and his attention wasn’t really on me; but as I described the funeral and told him which poem I’d said, he turned and listened. Afterwards he thought for a long, quiet moment, and then he said something I didn’t expect. He said, “Thank you.”

                He thought for a moment more, and added, “You know, Azlan, as a poet, I’ve always felt the need–not to be appreciated–but to be,” and he paused, settling into the right word, “of use.”

                When I started teaching English, I started there. I wasn’t sure what he had meant. I wasn’t sure how I could do it. But I remembered, and listened to my students, and wanted to try. I think he meant “of use” like a hand that helps me up into the open space of a mountain, where I can see things a new way, or a hand resting on my shoulder while I cry. I think he meant “of use” like the clear statement of a thought I’ve always meant to figure out, or the playful, hopeful song that reminds me of my heart. That reminds me my heart connects with others’. Richard Wilbur is all of those things, for me and for so many others. And so I know we can be them for one another.

                “On the battlefield called Vigrid,the gods will fall in battle with the frost giants, and the frost giants will fall in battle with the gods.” -Neil Gaiman, Norse Mythology

                Norse mythology makes me laugh, and frightens me, and confuses me, and pulls me into worlds of wind and fire. (And Gaiman’s telling is beautiful: full of mead and smoke, friendship and fear, coarse humor and the coursing currents of story). Ragnarok, the final fate of the gods, is a catalogue of old enemies ending each other: Thor kills the giant serpent Iormungand, and dies to Iormungand’’s poison breath. Loki kills Heimdall, and Heimdall kills Loki. We have these legendary pairs swinging for each other, as they always seemed “fated” to do, but there’s another story from long before Ragnarok that sticks in my mind and changes the entire world of Norse myths.
                In the first part of the story, a storm giant named Thiazi kidnaps the goddess Idunne and steals the golden apples she guards. The apples give the gods eternal youth; without them, the gods will grow old and die. Loki steals the apples back. Thiazi dies beneath Thor’s hammer. Thiazi’s daughter, Skadi, comes to avenge him. So far there’s trickery and treachery and fire, but it’s the next part that makes this myth stick out to me.
                Everything’s set up for another fight: instead, for a moment, there’s wisdom, compassion–and peace. Odin makes Thiazi’s eyes into stars, a monument to shine for as long as the world lives. Skadi marries Niord, the gentle god of the shallow seas. For a moment the two sides, the giants and the gods, come together, and then something happens that catches me so much that I’ve been trying for years to write my own version of this long myth.
                Skadi grew up in Thrymheim, her father’s mountain fortress, where the wolves howl and the winds sing sharp across the stone. Niord lives at Noatun, a coastal palace as beautiful and gentle as he is. The sea breeze lounges through long curtains, and the ocean laughs along the sand dunes. Married, Skadi and Niord try to split their time between these two worlds. Niord goes up to Thrymheim–but in his eyes the open cliffs look like fear, not passion. Skadi goes to Noatun–but in her hands the soft, malleable sand doesn’t feel real. So they let each other go. Niord stays by the sea, Skadi stays in the mountains. They stay in love, and see each other between their two worlds when they can.
                And if they were in love, if they shared their days and nights, there might have been a child. A child born of the breaking, rising, reaching mountains and the resting, swaying, breathing seas. I think there was. I wonder what she, or he, was like.
                Ragnarok isn’t the end of the world–it’s the end of these worlds. There will be something, again, afterward. I wonder what this child will do in Ragnarok. Her mother came from one side, her father from the other; both probably die in the battle. But I don’t think the child does. I don’t think she goes to the battlefield. Niord and Skadi recognized each other’s pride. They made space for it. They tended to their love. Each saw the other’s world and shared it as much as they could, and respected it when they couldn’t. They held each other, loved each other, let each other go. They came back together in the space between their homes.
                What is their child like? Having grown up in both their worlds, what world will she help make?

                “What the study revealed was that the same part of the brain that responds to a physical threat responds to an intellectual one.”
                “[When confronted with a challenging concept, your emotional mind says:] I will kill it with swords!”
                –The Oatmeal, commenting on this study

                A few weeks ago, my father and I went twelve rounds (or is it ten? Is that a boxing metaphor? I’m easily distracted by common phrases with origins I don’t know…) about gun control. A few days later, we went another twelve rounds–or even thirteen, maybe. We got angry. We yelled. We stomped. We were out on a ridge in California, and I feel like there was probably a squirrel watching, thinking, “What’s all this, then?”

                My dad and I agree on most things. We also have (of course) our old hurts. We also have (I’m grateful) a deep love for each other. The thing is, somehow in that moment, all of that real agreement and connection got pushed aside by a big angry SOMETHING. I think the appearance of that Something has a name: the Backfire Effect.

                The Oatmeal does a wonderful job of explaining the concept, but in brief, my mind tends toward “fight or flight” when I feel threatened. That’s not really a choice; yell at me unexpectedly, or surprise me with a bear behind my desk (well, now I have to check for that everyday. Which doesn’t sound bad, honestly…), and my pulse will jump, my muscles tense. I’m likely to have a surge of anger. The Backfire Effect is my brain responding to intellectual threats in the same way. I have core beliefs about how the world works and what is right. When those beliefs are threatened, the emotional center of my brain reacts the same way as it would react (in the Oatmeal adorable drawing) to an alligator with a knife.

                Since getting this new term from The Oatmeal’s comic, I’ve noticed myself Firing Back again and again. Once (“irony” is so often misused, but I think this is actually ironic) I even Fired Back about the Backfire Effect: I was discussing the comic with my students. When a group didn’t agree, I got mad. I wanted to yell at them. I wanted to shake them, beat my perspective into them. Then I looked down at my computer screen, saw the comic, and had to smile. When I looked up again, my students didn’t look like alligators with knives anymore.

                Since then it’s become a game. I watch for moments in which I’m experiencing the Backfire Effect. To be honest, I’m pretty bad at this game–for me, the effect usually includes a strong belief that I’m being reasonable, my anger is justified, and they (“they;” they’re terrible, aren’t they?) really are that wrong. I’m going to keep watching, though. If you put that bear behind my desk, I don’t think I could stop myself from feeling a moment of fear and anger–but then I could take a deep breath. The anger can have it’s moment (I’m not always against anger, after all), but it doesn’t need to become the only thing in my mind. If I take a deep breath, stay still, and look as calmly as I can at the bear, maybe we can figure out what’s next.

“There are worse things I could do / Than go with a boy or two…”
                –Grease

                When my friend and his beloved were about to get engaged, they talked several times about the ring. For a number of reasons they agreed that, though he could afford a diamond, they didn’t want one. But when it came time to buy something, my friend thought about getting a diamond after all.

                ‘Assume for a moment,’ he said, ‘That she and I love each other, and understand each other, and we really don’t want one. I think that’s true. But there’s still everyone else. If I don’t buy one, we have to explain that again and again and again, to our friends, our colleagues, our grandparents. She has to. I don’t want that.’

                Even if they were happy with their choice, they would still live within the web of everyone else’s judgments and assumptions and opinions. There’s a weight to that. (I told him they should give me a lesson in the explanation, and then just direct everyone’s questions to me. He didn’t think that was practical). While I treasure the individual open mind and deep heart, thinking and feeling toward what is right, we all live in that web. If you look at the etymologies, both “morals” and “ethics” are tied (through Latin and Greek) to words for “custom.” They’re words about how we do things. We. The community. We do it like this, with a sparkly bit of carbon.

                That’s the web Rizzo’s in, too. She can feel her community pulling at her, not actively but passively with its ideas of what’s worse. She doesn’t agree. That doesn’t solve everything. (What’s worse–going with a boy or two, or the casual, social cruelty with which we hurt others to drag ourselves up?). We can disagree, we can try to cut through the web, or reweave part of it by changing others’ minds, or find a community whose web feels different. But we live within the morals, the ethics, the customs that wrap around us. (My love for the individual’s moral compass is even the name of an essay: Self-Reliance, by one of my web-weavers). I think it’s important to remember that. I think it’s important to wonder what web we’re weaving around Rizzo. Will we push her to feel ashamed for going “with a boy or two”? Is that really worse (she asks us) than the causal, social cruelty with which we hurt others to make ourselves feel better? When she walks through High School, and sees how people look at her, what will we see as wrong?

                For my part, I don’t think we can escape from custom’s web, but I hope we can avoid diminishing each other with it. I hope someone saw Rizzo, singing there alone. I hope they listened: “I can feel, and I can cry…” she said. I hope they went to her with a kind heart and an open mind, trying to understand, and so made our web a little better.

“[I write] so that death finds me at all times
and on all sides exposed,
unfortressed, undefended,
inviolable, vulnerable, alive.”
                -Ursula Le Guin, “Ars Lunga”

                Sometimes I want to harden my heart. I want to care less. I want to do that because it seems easier, because caring hurts sometimes, because I’m worried that, if I care, the effort of my heart won’t make a difference.

                Sometimes, lying in my bed before I go to sleep, I wonder what I did with that day. (I don’t think this is a very good habit–it encourages me to see days as tasks to be completed, instead of as days to be lived). What I’m really doing in those moments is choosing a direction that I want to be moving in, and checking whether I went in that direction. The direction can be productivity: did I write today? Did I earn money? Did I produce? The direction can be knowledge: did I learn something? The direction can be connection: did I open my heart to a friend?

                I like Le Guin’s direction: the intention she brings to writing. It’s possible to build fortresses of apathy of power or disassociation around our heart. It’s possible to live so we cannot be touched. But it’s death that can’t be touched. It’s death that is unchanged, unaffected, uninvolved. Living roots wrap around stones: living grass drinks in the rain, and wilts in the heat. Like Le Guin, I want to learn to live undefended. I don’t want walls between the world and me. I want to be vulnerable to this, to you. That, says Le Guin, is how we become the most alive.

                Alive, vulnerable–and inviolable. I’ve often heard people say something like, “she’s so nice people take advantage of her.” Perhaps that’s not true. Perhaps real life, real vulnerability, can be hurt (that’s what the word means) but can’t be dishonored. Le Guin lets us into her heart. She invites us there. We can be rude, we can be violent, we can be kind–and none of that will lessen the honor, the life, of what she did. Even if we hurt her, we wouldn’t touch her openness, her honor. She let us in. She chose to.

                The vulnerable might be hurt more often; the living can heal, and grow, and care.

                -Bill Watterson

                When I was a kid (and okay, I feel silly writing that; let me put on my white beard), I wanted to figure out the way. I wanted to find the answer that was always right, the tool that was always useful, the rule that should always be followed. I still want that. Right now, right as I consider letting go of that search,  my mind’s rebelling, saying “But there are lessons that should always be followed! Like–like–kindness!” And okay, mind–but shh. Because I don’t think it’s true.

                 I think Watterson’s right. My first (young, childlike, passionate–immature) wish was to have hard and fast rules. I wanted compromise to be better than commitment, or commitment to be better than compromise. I wanted peace or revolution. I wanted my lack of activity to be Laziness (to be destroyed!) or Rest (to be defended!). I wanted something to be Worthy, or Not. Just now, I want (come along, struggling mind) to let go of this need for rules that are always right, and open up to responses that are, here and now, appropriate. Perhaps sometimes I should love–and sometimes I should reprimand. Sometimes I should relax, and sometimes I should redouble my efforts. Sometimes I should hold on, and sometimes I should compromise.

                It’s psychologically reassuring to have an obvious, inviolable truth–but even the continents move. And on a smaller scale where they seem still, I don’t think I’ll walk very far if I insist on taking steps with just one foot.