I learned a new word today, on this the sixteenth day of May in an upper Midwestern city with several lakes. Fingerspitzengefühl. It means “finger tips feeling”; the intuitive sense of a situation. I’m in a hammock, sitting near the mouth of a river. Two pontoon boats just passed me and my fingerspitzengefühl is a light scent of boat gas, the easy rocking of the hammock that I’ve hung off-center to get a sort of half-chair setup. The park is full of people and there is a duck working his way up river. And then he loses some ground when he sticks his butt up and puts his head down. There’s a family of three canoeing past. There’s a toddler pointing at me. There’s a power boat behind me on the lake. The finger tips feeling is flowing through my finger tips into the keyboard. The duck is moving out of sight.
I’ve been thinking about why I’ve been challenged to enjoy myself at work for years. I think it’s because I’m not in any way engaging my fingerspitzengefühl in a way that leads to situational development. My finger tips have felt stasis and analyzed why things have been stopped. I’ve gotten to know problems intimately, with very little agency over solutions-development, problem-elimination, or actually doing things. It’s a part of the reason why I have such a low opinion of organizations; my job has been to evaluate the situation and make decision recommendations to people who were not particularly interested in making decisions. I expect the decision-makers I worked for might remember it differently: I am impatient beyond a shadow of a sunny day in the desert. And yet my impatience was justified. Tremendous resources have been available for empathy, listening, and efficacy and most of the time and energy has gone into creating imaginary vanities, with the brightest possible lights and the cleanest possible mirrors. I think that has something to do with power, something to do with maleness, and something to do with “administration” as a supposedly useful thing. I like people and tend to respect peoples’ perspectives, therefore I am loathe to “administer” them (horror quotes).
I’m getting dizzy in this hammock, I set it swinging with a healthy shove a moment ago. I also have many burps, as I just ate three large slices of pizza. When I looked into mutuality recently, I was afraid I didn’t have any problems to solve in my life to lean on other people in mutual, collective problem-solving. I think this still might be the case; I am attracted to the notions that the development of notions of problems is the thing that makes problems in the first place. However, there are things I’d like to share mutually (and I’d like to share more of those things, an almost unlimited amount I think). Conversation, letters, physical acts (sports, etc.), food, gifts, words of affirmation, acts of service, and quality time. The love languages, basically, as a poetically brilliant friend of mine put it recently. And so to have love language and speak to many people. Such, in even the words of the arch-capitalist himself (W. Buffett), is the “problem” of living (“to love and be loved by those you love” to paraphrase into very much not scary quotes).
I saw two foxes this morning. As I biked up to the foxes, the ran in two different directions. I interpreted the cries and barks of one of the foxes, who was wet and rather small compared to the Garden State foxes I’ve seen, as wails of missing their fellow orange wanderer. I felt sad at the prospect of having separated these two creatures, possibly. I still feel sad. The yelps of that fox echo through my bones.
I’m swinging less now. The dizziness is dissipating. The hair tie in my hair is too tight. I’ve loosened it. My scalp is at rest. I’m thirsty, but avoiding drinking too much water because there is nowhere to surreptitious or openly pee in this park. And I believe the weather will support my stay in this hammock indefinitely.
So, I want that finger tips feeling, the fullness of the situation, in love language conversation. Everyone speaks a different language of loving. I’d like to learn more of these languages. They are all foreign to me. I appreciate deeply the feeling of understanding snapshots of the ways other people like to feel love and to receive love. I’d like to paint impressionistic oil paintings of these snapshots until my hand can no longer pick up a paintbrush. A primary reason I feel skeptical of organizations is the idea that many of them attempt to reduce interactions below love. To ignore the custom nature of every person’s love context to an administratable function. To count the number of seconds that make for an “effective” conversation. To identify the “molecular components” of an act of service and then manufacture thousands of these standard acts. To develop gifts that must be bought and can be acquired by millions of people, and all the same. I used to feel that gifts were a problematic way for people to interact, and then I discovered custom gift-giving, a practice of manufacturing contextually-sensitive item-sets and ritualistically giving an item-set to the person in whose context it is sensitive. Organizations, as far as I’ve observed, are effectively taking the awe out of these rituals and finding ways to standardize them. I have very little patience for this reductio strategy game at this point in my life.
Perhaps I’ll read these words years down the road and think, as Annie Dillard writes in an afterword to Pilgrim at Tinker Creek that my youthful fancies and aggressive stances needed to be worn down by the years. Perhaps I will find a way to become a better citizen of organizations. Or perhaps I’ll look back and think, wow, I really knew what was what back then, and I’m glad I wrote it just the way I did. Only time will reveal my older self’s perspective. And I will not presume to know myself, even tomorrow, when I meet me. I’ll continue to wonder if people ought to ritualistically take a different name every time they have a birthday. I think it could be wonderful. I have a birthday coming up in a couple months. What would my name be for this coming year? Perhaps I’d an accent mark or a vowel. Or perhaps I’d take my middle name and go fully incognito.
The birds are singing, or more likely, communicating with each other. I’ve read or heard (I can’t remember the discovery medium) that birds have higher pitches to their voices in cities, in order to be heard over the din. I wonder about the pitch of the birdsong in this isthmusy capital city in the Upper Midwest. I’d like to live in a place where cars are not allowed. If it weren’t a political impossibility (and not available to vote upon) I would vote to close all the streets to all cars. And even to remove pavement from many of the existing streets. Growing more things and not having to think about exhaust or deadly weapons on four wheels would be magical. Particularly if I didn’t have to move to the medieval downtown of a European city where it isn’t possible to drive to get such a thing. So I’ll keep telling people about my preferences and measuring the quality of the air. And make sure my fingerspitzengefühl is happening at a sufficiently high pitch that I can hear the messages coming in through my fingertips.
Roman Ryan 