Except for Stelios, who doesn't care much what anyone is doing, the proprietors and staff of my favorite establishments show a restrained curiosity about why I come for lunch between noon and 1pm when the average Greek or European shows up between 1:30 to 2pm – but more importantly, why I'm on my laptop for hours. While it would go unnoticed in just about any American casual eatery or cafe, it's completely out of sync with everything expected here. I especially enjoy the ones who don't ask, but sometimes look and have the question written all over their faces – like the very polite and kind people at Ktima Petra, who have clearly decided that whether it makes sense to them or not, I'm a pleasant and steady customer which leaves them content to leave it be.
A few proprietors with either more interest or chutzpah – like Stefanos at Agriolivadi or Jimmy in Hora – have asked. I keep it simple and tell them I'm a writer working on a book. They can categorize this and usually become supportive of my endeavors. Jimmy wants me to come back, have coffee with him, let him tell me some of his stories and see if I'll ghost write his autobiography. I appreciate his complete confidence in my abilities while having read nothing of what I write, let alone remembering my name.
As the weather warms and the tavernas and cafes slowly fill with tourists – most of them still domestic – my long laptop lunches begin to stand-out even more. The Greek families are having boisterous meals with conversation and warmth. The French and German ones are having more restrained ones with a fair amount of wine and beer. The French tourists are the most obvious because they're often having a glass of wine as early as 11am while Greeks are still well within the coffee time of day (which really never ends, but they take breaks for meals). Yet, there I am with my big bottles of water and eating lunch with a laptop…. Curiosity seems inevitable.
Curiosity is an interesting thing. Yesterday I wrote how it's essential to developing wisdom and growth. Then during supported bridge pose today I realized the cost of curiosity may be a deterrent. Not knowing can be very anxiety provoking. This is why for thousands of years humans have solved the problem of anxious uncertainty by doing what we do best – weaving stories. Myths, superstitions, wives tales and religions with a variety of creation stories have brought a level of order and certainty to humanity. We understandably seek the basic why's and how's of our existence and the world in which we find ourselves. Admitting how much we don't know could render our entire purpose and direction moot. We crave a floor and ceiling – and literally explaining the earth and sky is one of the first things religions have sought to do.
It's easy to see how opening up long settled questions sparks immediate fear. Copernicus and Gallileo were each placed under house arrest – a better sentence than they could have received – for their findings that the universe was not constructed the way the Catholic Church said it was. Evolution was highly contentious stuff when it came out and remains resisted in some communities today. Heck, at first I refused to believe Bill Cosby was a sexual predator – I mean, how could he be? For many people – and very understandably for the Black community – that was foundation shaking stuff. If Bill Cosby could be a predator, what left is there to trust?
It can be hard enough to take on the trials in life we expect might exist – financial challenges, health issues, divorce, war, strife between friends or family – but things that change our very paradigms – feeling our feet swept out from under us – well, what could be more frightening? I think it's this very feeling that people who are afraid of earthquakes must experience. You're going about living your life, your home, neighborhood, town all seem fine. You make your decisions about your day and life based on things being fine. Then, without warning, the ground shakes and everything is instantly dangerous – your very home and life threatened.
The HBO series, The Leftovers that ran from 2014 to 2017 dealt with this idea in a novel way. The premise involves an event called The Sudden Departure in which inexplicably, in a split second, 140 million people – two percent of the world's population – disappears. It's equally distributed around the world and across demographics: babies disappear from car seats, drivers disappear from cars, elderly from nursing homes and children from school. The show hypothesizes about how and what humanity would do with that. Unsurprisingly, it affects all kinds of people differently. Cults arise, governments find programs to support and compensate families and people who have experienced loss, war almost breaks out as nations suspect one another of foul play, conspiracy theories abound, lawlessness occurs, people fall into various forms of crisis and searches for meaning while others seek to bring order and a return to "normal". Theories and explanations abound while scientists work furiously to find explanations. Besides being an amazing exploration in grief, the show highlights how in one way or another people fill in the gaps of ambiguity with a wide variety of explanations that are most likely not true.
Being open and curious can be hard work. It requires a certain comfort with ambiguity and being willing to let go of ingrained beliefs in light of new information. Obviously, the best approach is not to assume too much – which reduces the chance of shock when you learn more. At the same time, we can't live in a state of complete ambiguity and distrust. We have to believe and assume some things just to live our lives. I assume the sun will rise tomorrow and gravity will remain. I know there's risk when I drive, but I assume I'll get from here to there and back safely. I also assume I have a tomorrow to consider – knowing that it's always possible I could die anytime.
One of the most difficult things is disappointment – and nothing disappoints and hurts so acutely as someone who does not come through when we have extended them our trust, made our decisions based on our belief in them, counted them as a reliable given.
Disappointment comes in innumerable forms, is inevitable – and is our greatest source of pain. We can be disappointed by everything from the weather to a parent not being able to deliver on a well-intended promise to Bernie Madoff stealing our money. There's a huge range and depth to disappointment. Betrayal is when disappointment was intentional or worse, meant to hurt – and is the most painful of them all. The closer the person, the more we engage them in interdependence, the worse the betrayal.
When someone close to us proves unreliable and disappoints – especially intentionally – it's like an earthquake or a car crash. We know it's possible, but we decided to take the leap of faith and assume it wouldn't happen – that it's a given. Worse, because we understand that other people disappoint – other than a parent or close family member who we inherit – we have highly evolved mechanisms for evaluating, screening, testing and reducing our risk before trusting. When we take a bet on someone, decide to make them a given, assume they're reliable and trustworthy, most of us have given the matter a lot of scrutiny – both consciously and subconsciously. So, when they disappoint or betray us, it becomes an indictment of ourselves as well as them. Even if our egos scream to protect us, we know we had a part in the situation and that pain can be devastating.
Not only did someone else fail us, but we failed ourselves.
It can then make sense to assume nothing – stop making the leap of faith that some things can be taken as givens. Maybe we are afraid to put faith in ourselves. Maybe come up with our own myths and stories to explain a world and situation that is either too painful to own, or not quite comprehensible? We need order to carry on – our psyches need a story to support them. But what if those stories are false? The chances are overwhelming they are – because the truth may well be that we don't know exactly what happened, or at least not enough of it to come to a correct and informed conclusion.
Is there an option to simply say, "Well, that happened…." and not conclude? Is there an option to say, "I can be okay and I'll be working on the lessons of this for a long time?" Can we live with that kind of ambiguity?
When Emily and I explored the Soi Nana red light district of Bangkok, we passed a cheap hotel at which a European man was asking for a room that could accommodate five people. He had a string of four Thai bar girls/prostitutes with him. Emily and I relayed this to her mom and Aunt Penny over breakfast in Bali a month and a half later.
"Okay, so I can figure out what he would do with two, even three, but I can't figure out the purpose of the fourth girl!" Emily said.
"I don't know but I'm gonna' be thinking about that all day long…." Aunt Penny responded to the laughter of the rest of the group.
So I have been wondering in turn, how much of Aunt Penny's curiosity and wonder can we maintain in the light of something to which we so desperately need to put to bed (no pun intended)? How much ambiguity can we live with in the name of the intentional pursuit of personal development and wisdom? How humble can we be in saying that perhaps we're not capable of deriving a conclusion, but only a thread of questions and thoughts that may take us somewhere?
As a footnote, Emily brought this five person room scenario up to many people for the remainder of our trip and beyond. To my surprise – although perhaps it shouldn't have been – over breakfast in Bali, my graphic and interactive designer friend Conlan built a model using flatware that provided the best working hypothesis.
That, right there, may be the only conclusion I can take from anything – that we must live with models and hypotheses. We might be right about them – we may have discovered a truth or the truth. We might have collected some wisdom. But realistically, we can't always know. I suppose we can decide our working theories hold up well enough to take the risk of relying on them – to make decisions based on them – knowing full well that our feet may be swept out from under us one day. To truly seek means being able to accept when what seems real might be a fallacy. Moreover, it means acknowledging how many of our givens are in fact calculated risks and sometimes you unexpectedly end up on the wrong side of the odds.
While I don't know the end of the story yet, it's possible I took a risk on love and lost. It's possible I relied on someone who for reasons I can't completely divine wasn't reliable in the way I had expected – in the ways she promised to be. I may feel disappointed and even betrayed – and that's okay. I also have to recognize that was always part of the risk I took – and despite my best efforts, my own judgment failed me in some way and moreover, my own actions contributed.
That said, if I'm going to grow as a person, I should recognize that whatever reasons and explanations I've been able to develop are not necessarily correct. They are possibilities – hypotheses that with time I'll observe and test. Maybe they'll hold well enough that they can become like postulates – mathematical truths like CPCTC we can't prove but hold as true – and I can operate off them with a high degree of certainty.
Still, I should always make room for the fact that I can't know for sure – and live in a world where what we know for sure is limited.
After all, for decades doctors and scientists believed – due to a correlation that wasn't proven as causation and which was eventually disproven – that the Spanish Flu was caused by Pfieffer's bacillus or what was then called Bacillus influenzae. Not just at the time but for decades afterward, it was assumed that this bacteria was behind the Spanish Flu much as it was behind cholera and a number of other serious diseases. It wasn't until later when some skeptical scientists with improved equipment were able to confirm that the Spanish Flu Epidemic of 1918 was actually caused by the H1N1-A virus which was likely novel at the time and has since come to endemicity within our population today.
There may be events, ideas, feelings or currents of life that I don't see or understand today – maybe of which Emily is no more aware or able to articulate. I shouldn't decide I better know anything other than my own thoughts and feelings after these ten weeks. I should expect there will be more to learn and many more questions to be asked as I try to make decisions knowing that information – and even more so, truths and conclusions - are limited and sometimes we just have to take our best stabs based on what's available to us.
One day, I may well tell my children that I made my best decisions based on the little I could know or understand – but using the best of my ability and with my heart in the best place possible. I hope to tell them that life is full of these imperfect moments and the best I could do was ask questions and attempt to learn as I went along – as we all do. That despite not being able to know (because none of us are), I was faced with decisions – big unenviable ones that I tried to live up to – and that I hoped in the rearview mirror would be proven good, if not necessarily right. And that when they face their big, unenviable decisions whatever they may be, they should ask all the questions they can, keep open minds, not assume too much – and that I plan to be there for them as they make their best calls.
