All of us begin our lives fueled by curiosity, yet far too many of us replace it with conformity. We are born unique but often die standardized. Henry Ford offered his Model T in any color his customers wanted ... so long as it was black. He was the master of standardization. This turned out not to be a sustainable idea for cars, much less for people. We are not supposed to look like or act like and certainly not live like we are the products of an assembly line.
It is far too easy to live our lives by default. And if we are not careful, we can easily become the sum total of all the expectations others impose on our lives. Too often we allow ourselves to become generic, standardized, homogenized. We too frequently just maintain the status quo ... conform to the expectation of others ... suppress our curiosity ... stop questioning ... refrain from stirring things up. We line up and march in single file. We just get in line all to often never even thinking to ask WHY WE ARE EVEN STANDING THERE AT ALL.
I think this begins way back in kindergarten. Janna and I spent a week in my daughter's [Alli] kindergarten class in Caracas, VZ this past March. One of the striking thing the kids learn and do in kindergarten is to line up for everything ... even to go to the bathroom. They line up for recess, for lunch, for snack, to change classes, literally everything. The highest honor a kid gets in kindergarten is the rotating task of being the "line leader" for the day. Heck it is even a fun task to be the "line caboose" for the day. And it is the line leader's and line caboose's job to keep all the other kids "in line." Somehow this becomes a pattern for our lives even to the subconscious level.
I sometimes notice this phenomenon at the movie theater when there is an extraordinarily long line for the sole ticket window even in the rain and then there is another window open and no one there in line. I will ask the worker manning the booth if he is open and he will say "yes" and then I will ask why no one is in his line and he will often answer with a sheepish look on his face that he "has no idea." After I have safely secured my tickets I have tried to free those in the long line to come on over and come out of the rain and receive the most distrusting looks from so many reluctant to believe. Why is it that we are more likely to get in line behind someone else than we are to start our own? Can it really go back to our kindergarten days and then just be socially reinforced through the decades that follow?
Eventually we find ourselves a part of a human assembly line surrounded by standardization, routine and predictability. We find ourselves miserable in the mundane. One day we end up finding ourselves looking at our image in the mirror and wondering who we are and why we are. Is life arbitrary? Or is there meaning behind it? Are we unique or are we incidental? Screen writer and actor Zach Braff captures this struggle to find uniqueness while wallowing in the blandness of everyday existence masterfully in the movie, Garden State.
This film follows the lives of a group of people who seem to be going absolutely nowhere and then the death of Andrew Largeman's [Braff] mother and the intervention of one person [Sam, Natalie Portman] who refuses to give up on her own uniqueness awakens him out of his lithium-induced slumber. The story reminds us that it is easy to become an echo instead of a voice. Yet we discover even one meaningless act that stands alone as unique can give us hope that our lives can, in fact, be different. It is ironic that we can be absolutely uncertain about what it is that we are looking for and yet be absolutely certain that we haven't found it. Still we know that we are searching for something; we just don't know for what or even why.
From our first breaths we have been on a journey. There are things our souls long for, and whether we have yet recognized it or not, our lives are shaped by our search for them. We are on a quest to discover our own uniqueness ... who we are, why we are here, and where we are going.
If we find ourselves endlessly thwarted in our search for our uniqueness, we may choose to end our quests and settle for sterile lives of empty existence. We must be careful not to mistake our surrender for rest.
... To be continued ...
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