TOADTalk: The Value of Searching
“A person who is looking for something doesn’t travel very fast.” Ms. Vickery quoted the book Stuart Little as she encouraged all to focus on the exploration process with optimism.
On Monday, students, faculty, and staff gathered in the bright sunshine of early Spring for Assembly, and Gallia Vickery opened the gathering with her TOADTalk. As the Teacher on Active Duty (TOAD), she gave the community something to focus on for the upcoming week: the value of searching with optimism.
I’ve been reading sections of this book called Books for Living, by Will Schwalbe, which basically gives a little synopsis of different kinds of lessons for living that can be found in other books. Each chapter is about a specific book including such titles as Reading Lolita in Tehran, Wonder, Zen in the Art of Archery, The Odyssey, 1984, The Girl on the Train, and Stuart Little. It’s taking me forever to read this book, because after each chapter I want to go back to sections of the books he referenced to make sense of it all for myself. So today, I want to talk a bit about the lessons in Stuart Little.
Will Schwalbe begins, “These days most of us do most of our searching with a keyboard. If we need to find something, we type something into a box and hit enter. But that’s really asking, not searching.” This is not the same as leaving a comfortable place and really searching for something—maybe an actual thing, or a place, or a person, or maybe something abstract, something that you hope you can find, but you aren’t even sure.
For those of you who haven’t read the book, or have only vague memories of it, the Little family has a child who is a mouse named Stuart. He’s small, but that’s almost the only thing the author makes mention of—no one ever talks much about the fact that he’s a mouse. Stuart is just a member of the family who is loved unconditionally, and I remember loving this aspect of the book. It seemed to confirm for me that it doesn’t matter if you are different from other members of your family, you will still be loved.
Stuart is a mouse of fine character, he is adventurous and brave and, most importantly, kind. He pilots a boat and drives a roadster, then he almost dies in a pile of garbage, but he is rescued by a bird named Margalo. Then Margalo the bird disappears from her nest and Stuart decides he must find her. He leaves home for the first time and finds plenty of adventure and meets people on the way, but the books ends and Stuart has not found Margolo.
In 1943, when E.B. White wrote the book, Anne Carroll Moore, who was the first children’s librarian at the New York Public Library was so disappointed in it that she told the book’s editor that it shouldn’t be published. But it was published and sold over 4 million copies in English alone. About the inconclusive ending, E.B. White said that it “plagued” him, “Not because I think there is anything wrong with it but because children seem to insist on having life neatly packaged.”
I think many people like life neatly packaged or in a simple way, they like closure. I like closure in the novels I read and my TV shows and movies. Perhaps, it’s one of the reasons we binge-watch shows. Closure is nice. You don’t have to wait too long for your questions to be answered: Crimes are solved, disasters are averted, alien creatures are either befriended or killed, romances bloom to happily ever afters. Closure is nice; it’s comforting. I’ve said that one of the reasons I love mathematics is that a well-solved problem is done and satisfying, whereas a paper or a talk can always be rewritten, edited, and improved. So, searching without closure or without finding may at first seem simply frustrating. But when you are truly searching, you are moving and moving really matters…..
One of the best pieces of advice I have gotten (from one of my dear friends here at Thacher) was that it was fine to change my life plan if I was moving toward something but not if I was simply running away from something. Searching is moving toward something. But you don’t have to be in a hurry—because I think you can be moving toward something important for a long time. As one of Stuart’s friends said, “a person who is looking for something doesn’t travel very fast.”
When I was in my twenties I read a book entitled, If You Meet The Buddha On The Road, Kill Him. I’ve never really studied much Buddhism, but I found this idea intriguing. I took two things with me from this book: first, that the most important things that each person must learn no one can teach him; and second, that if you meet the Buddha on the road—of course you know this is symbolic—the road is your path in life and the Buddha represents any guru or great teacher or idealized sense of finding the answers. So to me the idea was if life is about the searching and if then meeting the Buddha means you think you’ve found enlightenment, you need to recognize that you haven’t and that your search continues. If life is about the search, then you don’t really want to find the answers. Kill the Buddha.
The next vital part of the searching might be optimism. Optimism is not an easy thing for me. When stressed or busy, I see the problem before I start looking for a solution, and I worry a lot about what comes next. A little aside here—everytime I use the word worry I remember a quote from Erma Bombeck: “Worry is like a rocking chair, it keeps you busy, but it doesn’t get you anywhere.”
So I want to be more like Stuart Little. Stuart doesn’t worry much, he is remarkably cheerful and optimistic during his search. Remember at the end of the book, Stuart’s search is inconclusive. E.B. White said that the reason for leaving Stuart in the midst of his quest was to emphasize that “questing is more important than finding. Margalo, I suppose represents what we all search for and never quite find.” Will Schwalbe said, “This nonending is one of the most beautiful endings in all of literature.” So I will end with the last paragraph of Stuart Little:
“Stuart rose from the ditch, climbed into his car, and started up the road that led toward the north. The sun was just coming up over the hills on his right. As he peered ahead into the great land that stretched before him, the way seemed long. But the sky was bright, and he somehow felt he was headed in the right direction.”
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