Can't Not
I'm sitting here watching a Science Channel show on the human brain. I was hoping it'd be a little more than it is, cover new ground for me, but it's quite basic. So instead, I'm sitting here reviewing the day, reviewing the last two weeks away from home. It's been a spectacular experience, in breadth and depth, emotion and reason, history and the now.
Sam and I, and (brother) Sam and (his wife) Karen have had a few opportunities to just hang out. And a magnificent and unexpected thing happens each time: stories. I might go so far as to say that it's the primary connective tissue among us all.
I'm surprised at myself that it took me 40 years to notice that our family excels at story-telling. Stories about each other, about ourselves, about events, experiences.
[Eerily, the human brain program on the Science Channel just switched over to a piece about using story-construction as a methodology for enhancing memorization problems.]
We learn more about one another through our stories, tell one another about ourselves with stories. We remind, we reinforce, we correct one another's perceptions. More experiences become common through knowing, hearing. More experiences stay afloat in our own minds by telling.
Karens' mom is a superb artist with a splendid knack for color. Now, from age 7 to age 15 I attended an art school. It was a weekly thing, 2 hours a session after school. I learned many things from Mary Hughes, the teacher. I learned much about color theory, about the combinatorics of the palette, about shape, about interaction of elements. In other words: visual story.
One of Karen's stories tonight was about her mother, about art galleries in Jim Thorpe, PA. I learned a few things about her mother, by direct statement and by inference when she described her mother's behavior when in the presence of other artists. I learned about some of her mother's teaching techniques for young artists.
"Yes, but ____ _____ is about marketing. She markets herself," Karen says. "My mother does art because....well, because she just can't not do it."
Frank Herbert once wrote: "What do you despise? By this are you truly known."
I'm not so sure anymore. It's a useful perspective to try on, to wear for a while just to get a glimpse around the corner or behind that vertex, but it's no end-all to knowing yourself.
Another perhaps even more useful metric is the Can't Not.
That is to say, what activities do you do simply because you can't not do them? Which activities go beyond simple enlightenment or elective satiation and are as compulsory to your own life as breathing and eating and sleeping?
For me, in the last 10 years, the Can't Not is writing. This blog is just one more outlet for the Can't Not; fiction is another; private chronicling is yet another.
What is your Can't Not? I'd love to hear your stories.