You Don’t Fit In (and never will)

Researchers at Stanford tell us that newborns can mimic their mother’s face expressions within 19 minutes of their arrival here on Earth. Using the work of an old French social philosopher named Rene Girard, they use the theory of mimetic desire to explain why we vote the way we do, change our drink choice from martini to wine in a social situation, and today insist on pronoun declarations. Turns out we are hard-wired to belong. And so deep is this neurological tether, they argue, that even free agency is in doubt.

But worry not, the researchers say.

Once we understand mimetic desire we can hijack our own blind consumption and need for tribalism. Rational decision making can be ours again as we recognize the biological code we are expressing. Agency restored.

Those of you that read my stuff know that I use flying an old plane and my interests in Zen mindfulness to understand hard things. As I write this, I’m halfway across the Nevada desert, trailing a full moon, about 500 feet off the snow-blanketed sagebrush, listening to Andy Hedges’ podcast, Cowboy Crossroads. Waddie Mitchell, the most famous of the cowboy poets, rode his first drive on the stream now under my wing, the Owyhee:

“I was sixteen. I was hired to replace a cook that went missing. Your first crew is always your best crew, and this one especially because of its humor. If you got piled off in a bunch of cactus and rock they’d first check to see if you was dead and if you wasn’t dead you got laughed at for two or three days.”

Cowboys and Zen monks are good examples of people that understand how to be alone but also not break with tradition. (Tradition being our kind of plural equivalent to the individual’s need for mimicry.) But it’s the cowboy that really understands the consequences of not being able to rely on your crew.

“You put good men around you, men you can trust, men you can like, men that aren’t going to cause trouble in camp, won’t put TP on a red ant hill, those guys can make a crew awful good”.

The best communities are emulsions, not jigsaw puzzles. Individual elements that come together for a time, and at their best can appear harmonious, or perfectly complementary. Not static interlock.

It’s Called Living

The Owyhee is the warmest native trout stream in our country, and its headwaters, where Waddie first ranged, is now mostly owned by Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard. It’s about halfway between my own seasonal migration from coast to mountains. Flying a small plane from the so-called “new economy” of the Bay Area to the backcountry of Idaho constantly thrusts me between a world that has changed little and one that is changing rapidly. Wonderful as it is, it often just makes me feel I don’t fit in anywhere.

The Zen perspective on this is that I never will. And nor will you. Ever.

From the moment we don this spacesuit for Earth, as Ram Dass (born Richard Alpert) called it, we embark on a journey of separateness. The whole game is to become “somebody”. Like Chouinard, once we have done this, and confirmed it with plenty of external forms (career, houses, cars, even the right spouse and friends), we give it all away. Ram Dass described this as switching our orientation from the Forms to the Formless.

Whether or not you take the Zen perspective that there was really “no one” to begin with, or the cowboy’s perspective that it never belonged to you anyway, the message is universal: we are always looking to be reunited with safety or something bigger than ourselves. As Ram Dass put it, “we’re all just walking each other home”.

Of course, we need forms and they are ever so alluring. Especially the forms that appear to support our belonging to the right things. When we don’t fit in we try more desperately to fit in. A great deal is done to be seen and to be heard. We remain clueless largely because it works. Forms bring us momentary relief from the pain of feeling separate. We are confirmed by our status, find company in others playing the same game. We identify as successful, or even in our roles as “father” or “entrepreneur”.

But what we are looking for is connection. And most of us use forms as a way to connect. People do whatever they can to fit in. Then substitute that experience for connecting. It’s called living. It’s what we do. Forms are the chess pieces that move our game down the board.

All Forms Fail

Once we see that forms are passing, or don’t ever really give us the sense of connection we so deeply long for, we begin the great journey home. You might say this is a material form of self actualization. Author David Brooks refers to this as climbing our “Second Mountain”. Your first mountain was career, house, family. Your second mountain requires digging much deeper, and ultimately comes into view only when you recognize the most valuable and vanishing of all commodities, time.

The transcendent poem “We Never Rode The Judiths” by Waddie’s fellow cowboy poet legendWally McRae reminds us to live “grey-wolf wild” and carpe diem. Speaking of the elders that taught him horses, he says: “They don’t get into it for prestige. They get into it because they are a cowboy. They are just looking for a home.”

A Door Opens

While I grew up with horses, flying has become a sort of home and spirit for me. I take refuge in movement, probably the result of a childhood constantly on the move, the son of a professional smuggler.

Flying is the ultimate form of removing myself from the complexities of living. From up above, things seem simpler. And I am also, conveniently, unreachable. It’s interesting that flying a small plane is associated with both danger and being removed. I don’t cut a very good image of a cowboy, and even less so of a monk, but my frustrated commute between mountain and sea, new economy and old, is not unlike wanting to be both untouchable and living with the thrill of risk. I’ve lost many friendships and risked all financial and social security trying to do just the opposite: fit in.

But when something stops working, a door opens.

This is where a guy in a small plane, above it all, might wax prophetic on such an invitation. The truth is that I have no clue. This period of culling friendships, or being culled by them, is painful. Even my career is changing. My kids are with their friends. I’m spending more and more time alone.

What to do?

Look inward? Develop a connection with myself? This is the new work. I know at least now that I don’t fit in. I’m coming to accept that I never will.

Connection has different aspects and interpretations, and I think the part we’re yearning for is the closeness, not the conformity. And for two things to be close, they must first be separate. Can we achieve connection without expectation? Come together without the Calvinist predestination of the tongue and the buckle?

Order

The last view off my wing is Jiggs, Nevada with the Ruby Mountains beyond. There appears to be a one room schoolhouse, maybe a post office and certainly a bar, easy to spot with the pickup trucks parked out front. It’s Waddie Mitchell’s home town. He continues to ranch and write here at 80. Like being atop a horse on a ridge, flying just a few hundred feet off the prairie can make the world seem simpler, or as my hometown poet Robinson Jeffers said “distance makes clean”.

My plane’s little engine burns barely a few gallons of fuel an hour. I can land in any of these open pastures at about the speed of a bike. Not so dangerous or expensive. My small metal cage that separates pilot from the least tangible of the classical elements suggests that the armor is the vulnerability.

All great spiritual maxims contradict themselves, and so it is with flying: it’s both a feeling of autonomy, and vulnerability. That is, being connected and disconnected. Being a part of something and quite apart from it.

In the 19 minutes it takes a newborn to put this together, that they are both connected to and suddenly apart from their mother, it makes sense human biology would provide a pathway to not get left behind. We needed to belong. Free agency was the thing that would make it all worth it, allowing us to exist somewhere between our French polymath, and the better known Austrian one, Victor Frankl:

“Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”

My friend Gabe Rosen, who introduced me to Cowboy Crossroads, likes to make fun of the saying “wherever you go, there you are”. The emphasis, he says, is on the wrong thing. The point is you.

You don’t fit in. You never will. Stop worrying about stating your pronouns, and start becoming worthy of a proper noun — your own. And order that martini.