A Lesson from Goldilocks
To perform well in American academic settings, children learn a number of little tricks with the intent of making the most of an inherently limited base of knowledge. Test-taking strategy 101 obliges he or she who is being tested to answer first the questions to which the answers are known, and then go back and work through those that are more difficult.
This works fairly well for the standardized tests that mark a child's progress through the primary and secondary school system, and, I would even venture to say, most of the tests anyone encounters in the course of a college education.
It occurred to me yesterday, though, that many of us grow into adults and try to apply a similar strategy to daily living. This is not to say that there is no wisdom in this approach, as there most certainly is insofar as it keeps one from becoming paralyzed, caught in consternation, confounded by one of the particularly puzzling challenges of modern life while the ceaseless race - to what?!?!- continues, less one fool stuck on question number three.
But I also see a problem that inevitably arises when one persists in such a manner. The easy questions are in endless supply. Coffee or tea? SUV or compact? Red or Blue? White or wheat, shoes or sandals, East coast or West? Sure, we can make them difficult, and lord knows, we do. Why?
When we are busy with the easy questions, we have a good excuse for leaving the difficult ones unanswered. It is our own personal form of jingling the keys in our pockets, a determined attempt to keep everyone, even ourselves, convinced that we're busy. 'Sorry, soul,' we tell ourselves, 'I am busy looking for crackers without trans-fats and checking my stock quotes and fantasy baseball team. Who I am, what I want, your siren song, will have to wait until tomorrow.' Then tomorrow comes and- surprise!- we end up mired in a flood of all new and equally pressing easy questions, and the difficult ones can once again be justifiably left unresolved. It's not like- heaven forbid- we weren't doing anything. It's not like we were holding still, thinking, reflecting, growing into ourselves. We were doing things! If you don't believe us, just look at our lists with all their pretty little check marks.
People, and for that matter, a culture- which, let it be known, I do not exempt myself from- that does this for a long enough time will inevitably be left with quite a collection of big, difficult questions accompanied by equally big, empty spaces where the answers ought to be, and all the easy answers in the world won't fill in those spaces.
What we forget is that not all of the questions are equal in value. In a culture that values productivity and efficiency above all else, the ability to assign value to anything based upon quality is often lost in the pursuit of increasing quantity. Quality and quantity are similar goals in that they both require time and energy. More importantly, however, they are opposite, synergistic, yin and yang. A successful culture, or a successful life, requires a balance of the two. In Japan, there is a traditional way of growing fruit where all but one developing fruit are cut from a branch. Obviously, this results in a much diminished quantity of fruit, but the quality of that fruit is unsurpassed. When a farmer focuses on getting as many apples as he can from each tree, the number of fruits harvested is of course increased, but the quality of each fruit suffers. Ever had a bad apple? No number of those could take the place of one perfectly crisp one. That said, it is of course an equal but opposite travesty if so few apples are harvested that no one gets to taste one at all. It would seem to me that we ought to strive for a middle ground. Not too many apples, not too few. Like Goldilocks, we need to find the porridge that is juuuuuuust right.
Coming up with a million easy answers is useless if the questions are worthless. In order to produce anything worthwhile, be it fruit or an original idea, an innovative thought, we have got to slow down enough to recognize the worth of the questions to which we apply our time and energy.
Steady as we go.
This works fairly well for the standardized tests that mark a child's progress through the primary and secondary school system, and, I would even venture to say, most of the tests anyone encounters in the course of a college education.
It occurred to me yesterday, though, that many of us grow into adults and try to apply a similar strategy to daily living. This is not to say that there is no wisdom in this approach, as there most certainly is insofar as it keeps one from becoming paralyzed, caught in consternation, confounded by one of the particularly puzzling challenges of modern life while the ceaseless race - to what?!?!- continues, less one fool stuck on question number three.
But I also see a problem that inevitably arises when one persists in such a manner. The easy questions are in endless supply. Coffee or tea? SUV or compact? Red or Blue? White or wheat, shoes or sandals, East coast or West? Sure, we can make them difficult, and lord knows, we do. Why?
When we are busy with the easy questions, we have a good excuse for leaving the difficult ones unanswered. It is our own personal form of jingling the keys in our pockets, a determined attempt to keep everyone, even ourselves, convinced that we're busy. 'Sorry, soul,' we tell ourselves, 'I am busy looking for crackers without trans-fats and checking my stock quotes and fantasy baseball team. Who I am, what I want, your siren song, will have to wait until tomorrow.' Then tomorrow comes and- surprise!- we end up mired in a flood of all new and equally pressing easy questions, and the difficult ones can once again be justifiably left unresolved. It's not like- heaven forbid- we weren't doing anything. It's not like we were holding still, thinking, reflecting, growing into ourselves. We were doing things! If you don't believe us, just look at our lists with all their pretty little check marks.
People, and for that matter, a culture- which, let it be known, I do not exempt myself from- that does this for a long enough time will inevitably be left with quite a collection of big, difficult questions accompanied by equally big, empty spaces where the answers ought to be, and all the easy answers in the world won't fill in those spaces.
What we forget is that not all of the questions are equal in value. In a culture that values productivity and efficiency above all else, the ability to assign value to anything based upon quality is often lost in the pursuit of increasing quantity. Quality and quantity are similar goals in that they both require time and energy. More importantly, however, they are opposite, synergistic, yin and yang. A successful culture, or a successful life, requires a balance of the two. In Japan, there is a traditional way of growing fruit where all but one developing fruit are cut from a branch. Obviously, this results in a much diminished quantity of fruit, but the quality of that fruit is unsurpassed. When a farmer focuses on getting as many apples as he can from each tree, the number of fruits harvested is of course increased, but the quality of each fruit suffers. Ever had a bad apple? No number of those could take the place of one perfectly crisp one. That said, it is of course an equal but opposite travesty if so few apples are harvested that no one gets to taste one at all. It would seem to me that we ought to strive for a middle ground. Not too many apples, not too few. Like Goldilocks, we need to find the porridge that is juuuuuuust right.
Coming up with a million easy answers is useless if the questions are worthless. In order to produce anything worthwhile, be it fruit or an original idea, an innovative thought, we have got to slow down enough to recognize the worth of the questions to which we apply our time and energy.
Steady as we go.
posted by bella.calamitas at 6:35 AM
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