Fortune favours - What is it to be human?

Offered from a friend of What is it to be human? - Steve:

This article is my response to the call from ‘what it is to be human’ for ideas worth sharing. The suggestion that not all such ideas need to be converted into a TED talk appealed to me.

From the many definitions of ‘idea’ available two shone out:
· A vague notion or indication; inkling
· A groundless supposition; fantasy.

As I attend to the first of these ‘definitions’ and write out my thinking, I suspect that I may be unwittingly demonstrating the accuracy of the second one. I have always been attracted to being vaguely right rather than precisely wrong. This maxim allows me the freedom to express myself from within without feeling the need to slavishly follow academic processes.

I am soothed and stimulated by Richard Feynman’s words:
“I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”

One of the side-effects of academia is an almost pathological need to support one’s own words with quotes from others. A more generous interpretation is that it shows deep gratitude for others who have covered similar ground in the past and demonstrates rigour.

Definitive statements rarely ring completely true to me; I have a preference for stories that use the mechanism of allusion, hinting at real truth rather than smacking me in the face with conviction-based beliefs masquerading as truth. A truth that is often refuted later.

Here is a currently favourite story that I found online:

At forty, Franz Kafka (1883-1924) who had no children, was walking through the park in Berlin when he met a girl who was crying because she had lost her favourite doll.

She and Kafka searched for the doll unsuccessfully. Kafka told her to meet him there the next day and they would come back to look for her.

The next day, when they had not yet found the doll, Kafka gave the girl a letter 'written' by the doll saying, "Please don't cry. I took a trip to see the world. I will write to you about my adventures."

Thus began a story which continued until the end of Kafka's life. During their meetings, Kafka read the letters of the doll carefully written with adventures and conversations that the girl found adorable.

Finally, Kafka brought back the doll (he bought one) that had returned to Berlin. "It doesn't look like my doll at all," said the girl. Kafka handed her another letter in which the doll wrote: "My travels have changed me." The little girl hugged the new doll and took her home, happy. A year later Kafka died.

Many years later, the now-adult girl found a letter inside the doll. In the tiny letter, signed by Kafka, it said, "Everything you love will probably be lost, but in the end, love will return in another way."

To complete this short piece, I turn to another writer who has recently crossed my path.

“You never know for certain about anything. This sounds falsely modest and trite, but it’s the honest truth. Most of the time you are right and you do appear to know, but every now and then the rules seem to get broken and then you realise how lucky you have been on the occasions when you think you have known and have been proved correct."

From: A Fortunate Man: The Story of a Country Doctor. John Berger and Jean Mohr.

I am a fortunate man in my own time in that I have the opportunity to sit, and think and write. My reflecting through writing helps me to sort out what I want to say. And I hope that the reader gains something too. Our interaction, through the written word, is part of what it is to be human.