Anthropologist on Mars
Neorologist Oliver Sacks wrote a collection of narratives about "different-brained" people and how they experience life. The title story is about an autistic woman, Temple Grandin, who describes how she feels as unlike other humans as a cow or a Martian.
Grandin explains that she has learned to "fit in" by studying the way normal people react and learning to mimic them. Despite being highly-functional, it is all an act, superimposed upon her essential otherliness.
I feel like a will never understand how normal people emotionally react to life. I am not upset by what other people are, yet upset by what other people are not. I am not threated by what other people are, yet threatened by what other people are not. When it comes to observing life, and breaking down complex ideas, I have a special flare. It seems I have always been a natural anthropolgist. But when it comes to my own reactions to my own life, I just don't get it. How can one be so emotionally and socially sophisticated when it comes to sizing up other people's problems, giving articulate advice and penetrating right to the essence of the matter and yet be so hopelessly clueless when it comes to his own problems. For me to have normal emotional reactions is like memorizing an intricate set of dance steps.
Maybe someday, if I stay sober long enough, I'll get it. This is, I hope, what it means in the Promises when it says, "We will intuitively know how to handle situations which used to baffle us." Until then, I'm just trying to be a patient student learning the moves and trying to copy them as best I can.
4 shares:
First of all, Ben, as long as we do what we need to do we WILL stay sober, so I'm waiting to see a post one day that will say I GOT IT
meanwhile i totally agree with you. i think it is related to objectivity/subjectivity. the best way to look at it is that when we date a person from the opposite gender and fall in love, we are incapable of discerning character defects. It is not only that we make excuses for the ones we see, it is that we don't even see most of them at all. Years later, after the initial love dissipates, suddenly we think and fell that our spouse "changed"... in reality we changed and we can now see the character defects that existed all along. The same applies with the way we look at ourselves with the only difference that time makes it worse not better. Only a fearless moral inventory can eventually bring us to be able to analyze ourselves properly and find the solutions to our emotional disfunctionality.
Rabbi Ben,
What is a good spiritual message today?-- I need some inspiration!
Today is the 17th of Tammuz, when the walls of Jerusalem were breached and the enemy entered the holy city. It is a day of fasting and mourning.
A teacher of mine once asked, "What makes coffee sweet - the sugar or the spoon? The spoon! If you put the sugar in and don't stir it, it doesn't get sweet."
This he explained is the idea of a fast day. Not eating is no big deal. You have to use the spoon and stir yourself up.
Thanks.
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