Each time we interact, we change each other’s brains, and each time we respond to a thought or emotion, we change our own.–Miriam Boleyn-Fitzgerald, Pictures of the Mind
Although I’m kind of a knowledge junkie, I’ve always argued for the limits of human understanding. I’ve been railing against the pointlessness of trying to figure out why something happened or why someone or something is the way it is for decades. Of course, I fall into the very same trap myself. My personality is such that I expect things and people to be and behave logically or at least to stay out of my way. Talk about an exercise in futility.
My assertion has always been, though, that the reason there’s no point in trying to figure out the why of someone or something is that since we never, ever have all the information, we can never, ever get a complete answer. It’s a bit of a fool’s game to believe we can answer why questions with convincing certainty.
[W]hen you explain a why, you have to be in some framework that you allow something to be true. Otherwise, you’re perpetually asking why. –Richard Feynman
That doesn’t stop us from doing it. We think that when we know the why of something, we then understand it. And if we understand something, we can accept it or at least know how to deal with it. It’s as if the why is even more important than the what. When it comes to people and why they are the way they are or do the things they do, why questions most often go to backgrounds or motivations. Given that we don’t even know what our own motivations are for doing what we do, thinking we can know someone else’s motivation is more than hubris—it’s delusional.
But, again, we all do this. Asking why questions is very compelling. It seems to be a built-in mechanism that operates first and foremost to explain ourselves to ourselves. Asking and answering why questions helps us construct and maintain a consistent personal narrative—a sense of personal identity. It also operates to explain the external world to us.
Good Enough for Government Work
But another problem with why questions, in addition to the fact that our answers are always incomplete at best, if not wholly erroneous, is that once we get an answer that seems satisfying, we close the door on that particular line of inquiry. Once we get a good-enough answer, the cause and effect link is cemented into place. Occasionally someone might say about something, “Well, that’s as good an explanation as any,” but we could say that about the vast majority of our explanations: one is probably just as good as another. Yet we believe in whatever answers we’ve arrived at, and we proceed as if they are the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. So to an extent we do create our own reality, and this is how we do it, through constructing and maintaining a very flawed and false sense of certainty about ourselves and the world around us.
We abhor uncertainty, so any explanation, even a wrong or partial one, is better than none at all.
I’ve been trying to pay attention to this process of explaining everything to myself. It’s exhausting. What a relief when I just admit I don’t know why something or someone is the way it is (or I am the way I am), and I don’t need to come up with an explanation. There’s a surprising amount of freedom in not having an explanation.
What questions seem to be a lot more open-ended than why questions. They cast a wider net, and they tend to focus more on the here and now. I wonder if asking what questions might be a way of training our attention on the present and away from restlessly searching for facile explanations just so we can maintain a comfortable and consistent narrative.
Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible. —Eugene Ionesco
I haven’t tracked this down, but I think it was George Bernard Shaw who said humans are cursed with explaining ourselves to ourselves. More often than not, any old explanation will do, as long as it can be woven into the fabric of our ongoing personal narrative.
It is a curse, a burden, a pointless exercise, and more than a habit. It’s an addiction. It separates us from our experience, too. We can’t be both explaining and aware at the same time.
But where—and who—would we be without our explanations? I think that’s one of those questions worth asking.
Buddha is supposed to have described our minds as resembling a drunken monkey that’s been stung by a bee. The monkey mind—whether or not drunk, whether or not bee-stung—is a restless mind. It chatters incessantly, shifts from thought to thought, is easily distracted, undisciplined, and most importantly confused. Sounds a lot like ADD or ADHD, but really this pretty much describes all of us to one extent or another. It’s just that many of us are in denial about it. We think we—not some passel of drunken monkeys—are in charge.
There’s not much evidence to support that belief, however. What neuroscience increasingly reports is that our brains are doing far, far more than we ever imagined they were doing. Not only are they keeping us physically alive, they’re directing our thoughts, feelings, and actions. The majority of our “choices” take place at the unconscious level. We only think we’re in the director’s chair because we’re so darn good at spinning yarns to explain why we just did what we did, thought what we thought, or felt what we felt. We are, as one author has called humans, the storytelling animal.
Each of us undertakes the same major creative project, which is the story of ourselves. It’s a constantly evolving work-in-progress into which we weave everything we do, no matter how seemingly inexplicable those things may be. It’s our nature to create this story, so we’re very good at it. So good, in fact, that our audience isn’t even aware of the fiction. Those are the best kinds of stories, right? The problem is that our audience is us.
[T]he intuitive feeling we have that there’s an executive “I” that sits in a control room of our brain, scanning the screens of the senses and pushing the buttons of the muscles, is an illusion. Consciousness turns out to consist of a maelstrom of events distributed across the brain. These events compete for attention, and as one process outshouts the others, the brain rationalizes the outcome after the fact and concocts the impression that a single self was in charge all along.—Steven Pinker
Our stories help us maintain the fiction that we’re in charge. So instead of recognizing and accounting for the vast expanses over which we are not in charge, we continue merrily along, spinning our tall tales.
It isn’t that we’re never authentic, never conscious, always asleep at the switch. From time to time, we are conscious, maybe some more than others. But the irony is that because we think we’re already always in charge—already always making conscious choices—most of us never learn how to become more awake and aware, never discover how to increase our ability to set our own course and make it so. Why bother learning how to do something when we’ve already mastered it?
Intention is one of those words that has to cover a lot of ground. By that I mean we tend not to make very good distinctions when we use it. Intention can refer to anything from our most informal plans all the way up to major goals and even life purpose. More often, though, intention gets the casual treatment.
I intended to do it, but didn’t because…
I didn’t intend for X to happen.
I intend to take care of that this afternoon.
There’s nothing wrong with using intention that way, but it does rob the word of power. Do our intentions amount to nothing more than completing tasks on our to-do lists? While I don’t want to downplay the value of completing things and doing what we say we’re going to do, there’s more to intention than that.
I don’t think it works to approach making a difference in the world the same way we approach dealing with meeting a deadline. But I suspect we often do. Maybe the result of treating all of our intentions equally is that we end up with an equally weak commitment to following through on them.
Since an intention to gas up the car on the way home from work, an intention to improve one’s bad habits, and an intention to create a meaningful life are not all of the same order, having a way to distinguish among them might be useful. We could refer to our day-to-day intentions as lowercase intentions and our larger, purpose-driven intentions—the ones that require our conscious choice—as uppercase intentions.
As it turns out, defining, declaring, and attending to uppercase intentions makes it so much easier to follow through on lowercase intentions.
