Sometimes things aren’t what they seem. And sometimes they are exactly what they seem, which can be even weirder.
One afternoon, as I walked toward the school building where
I taught, I passed two of my 4-year-old students on the playground. Both boys
had buckets on their heads. Reflexively, I said, “Nice hats.”
They both looked at me as if I were completely insane.
“These aren’t hats, silly!” one cried. “We just put buckets on our heads!”
“Oh, of course! Now I get it!”
A big part of childhood play is transforming objects through
imagination. A chair is the seat of a space shuttle, a blanket over a table
makes a fort, a blade of grass becomes a diamond ring. So naturally, a bucket
can be a hat.
Or not.
In the adult world, it can be hard to accept that things are just what they
seem. I have wasted a lot of time trying to come up with logical explanations
for the inexplicable.
When people and institutions don’t make sense, I look for some piece, some person, some rationale or
missing fact that will put it all in place. But by the time I arrive at that
point, scratching the surface yields more questions (like, “How can this
possibly be?”). The more I learn, the more apparent it becomes that the whole
thing is deeply, pervasively illogical.
And the more that happens, the more I ruminate, coming up
with creative, wild hypotheses that might make great plots for HBO dramas, but are
probably too far-fetched even for that.
“Maybe some years ago, Person A saved the organization by
secretly contributing hundreds of thousands of dollars and that’s why….”
“Maybe Person B knows where Person C’s skeletons are buried and
that would explain...”
Surely it can’t be that people are actually dishonest,
greedy, power-mad, crazy or willfully ignorant. Surely institutions don’t cover
up dysfunction with more dysfunction until the whole thing is one big façade.
Surely things are just as we learned in school – do your best, get straight
A’s, tell the truth, and everything else falls into place.
Life is fair, right?
So people who get D’s don’t make honor roll. People who lie
get punished for it. People who don’t know anything about, say, Art Education
don’t become Directors of Art Education at Art Schools. Places that are going
under financially don’t insist on repeating the same patterns that got them
there, with a little more navel-gazing.
Unfortunately, when things seem dysfunctional through and
through, in every way, it’s often because they are. No amount of thinking will
come up with a reasonable explanation. As my wiser sister told me once, when I
was in full rumination mode, “You’re trying to make sense of something that
just doesn’t make any sense. We want to make sense of things so we can
understand them, but some things just don’t make sense.”
Sometimes it’s hard to accept that senseless things are just
what they seem.
Sometimes it’s mind-boggling to find that they really are
not complicated, or accidental, or unclear.
Sometimes people with buckets on their heads are just people
with buckets on their heads.
All you can do is accept it, smile, and move on.
