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Conformity has its price. |
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People-watching is a sport for most everyone. We all subconsciously classify and sort our data, correlating traits and extrapolating brief observations into complete personalities. Of course, faulty correlation and extrapolation is the root mechanism of stereotyping and bigotry. So we have to be careful! We all use our lifetime collection of people-watching data for understanding other people, particularly people who are unusual. Normal people, those whose collection of personality and behavioral traits fall comfortably within 80% of the bell curve of humanity, often don’t want to be bothered with the unusual people. What they would really like is for those unusual people to get with the program and act right! Or so they think. The irony that normals miss is that without the unusual people, their lives would be even duller than they already are. My observations tell me that giftedness and creativity are most often accompanied by unusual behavior. All the while the normals are disparaging the differences in unusual people, they are allowing these same people to provide them with the things that make the world a better place. How many painters, sculptors, writers, musicians, poets, actors, and other artists are in that 80% we call normal? Likewise, how many scientists, engineers, computer programmers, or mathematicians, who are at the top of their craft, fit into the normal catagory? In my experience, even the ones who appear to be normal are often simply pretending, all the while hiding their particular differences from all but intimate friends. Would the same normals who rail about abnormal lifestyles or behaviors want to live in a world without Mozart, Van Gogh, Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Thoreau, Jesus, or Buddha? If they were still alive, would normal people want to associate with these oddballs? History suggests not, since in their day, most normals shun and mistreat unusual people. I rarely watch hospital dramas on television, but I happened upon a Chicago Hope episode recently, where the theme immediately caught my attention. A gifted pediatric cardiac surgeon is called in from another state to do a leading-edge procedure on a little girl. As it happens, he is afflicted with Tourette's syndrome, which causes frequent obsessive twitches, movements, and utterances. The unnerving behaviors affect the other characters in various ways. Even though his symptoms are reported to disappear during the intense concentration in the operating room, the parents are uneasy about entrusting their daughter's life to him. The chief surgeon fears him and wants him to leave, and a long-time woman friend, who really likes him, is turned off sexually by him. Of course the Hollywood ending has people finally accepting him with both his gifts and his afflictions. As the plot is winding down, one of the characters says something like, "The most gifted among us are often beset by personal demons that they must endure for a lifetime." As I’ve observed people over the years, I’ve found that normal people are very reality based. They understand how their world works, they accept it, and they structure their lives to fit into it. Really exceptional people always have a tendency to blur reality with fantasy, gaining in the process an ability to see what isn’t yet there, but could be. They invariably enjoy stretching their minds by dreaming of new realities, and they often turn these flights of fancy into art or ideas. Much has been written about personality types and abilities, and their relation to brain structure. Brain research has revealed many areas where various functions are centered. For example language is clearly a function of the left cerebral cortex, and emotion and spatial perception of the right. Popular culture has even adopted the habit of referring to left brained and right brained people, based on the apparent major functions of the two halves of the cerebral cortex. We may speak of left brained, rational, linear thinkers, and right brained, emotional, passionate artists. Of course, barring unusual disease, we all have complete brains. But we assume that some of us use more of one side than another. So what about people who exhibit both left and right brain tendencies? Are there rational artists? Are there people who can be both? Perhaps so. What might such persons be like? Maybe they would have well developed rational, logical problem solving abilities, but they would also have a creative, passionate, emotional component. Might these people be some of the most unique and gifted of all? Would the ability to see the logic of music coupled with the passion of creativity lead to a Bach? Or would such completeness lead to a Da Vinci, who could both create masterpiece paintings and invent flying machines? Would it be surprising that their mental activity would be so heightened that they would find it impossible to live a simple normal life? But that same ability to see what isn’t there yet has a dark side. The ability cannot be turned on and off. It is always on. And so, such people cannot think about life as normals do, cut and dried, monotonous and unchanging, preoccupied with the present, nostalgic about the past. They think about possibilities, and their observations of life lead them to insights, which lead to more questions, which cause more flights of fancy, which lead to ..... The inevitable path as reality and fantasy intersect, and fantasy, coupled with desire, acquires purpose, is a growing passion to alter personal reality. If a different world can be conceived, can it be created and inhabited? The creative impulse reaches a crescendo as acceptance of the “normal” world falls off into diminuendo, and the artist sets about creating the new fantasy world. Thus, the most gifted sometimes enter their own special place. Occasionally, the normals, who cannot conceive of such things, refer to these special places as insanity. I wonder if those people in those special places see it that way? I’ve grown to watch people in a different way. I tend to seek out the oddballs, since the normals aren’t nearly as interesting. The oddballs usually have fascinating stories to tell, and if they come to trust you, they have amazing gifts to share. Maybe it proves the old saw, "It takes one to know one."
12/19/99 |
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Last Update 4/5/04 |