Empty Monkey (Dot Com) - The real-time story of how the book is written

Late one evening, my son, noticing that I was a little under the weather, offered me a cup of hot chocolate. It was not what it appeared to be.

The drink in question was quite disgusting, due to the similarity between chocolate powder and gravy powder. An easy mistake when the ingredients are kept in unmarked jars.

This made me think about the nature of expectation, and how appearances can be deceptive.

Like strawberries and onions, some people do not mix well. In extreme cases, some are positively toxic to each other. I like Strawberries and cream. I also like Onion and cream casserole. But strawberries and onions; not such a good idea. So why should we expect our friends to get on with each other, should we be surprised when they don’t?

Some never leave their dish. The comfort of the familiar is like the member of a club, who in old age will still insist that the chef serve up the food of their boarding school.
Or the parent, who will not go abroad with the children because “I don’t want to be poisoned by all that foreign food”.

Others are more adventurous; they like to move around, to dip into other dishes and sample unfamiliar tastes. Their outlook is more open to ideas that could contradict their beliefs or customs.

These are lifes party-givers, the ones whose enquiring minds and readiness to assimilate, or at least sample, ideas and opinions of others, makes them accessible to both the Youthful strawberry and the withered onion. Maybe they are like the cream that goes with many dishes?

When I was teaching English to foreign children, one trick to encourage them to look at both sides of a question was to hold up a coin and ask “What do you see” the answer was usually “a coin” or “it is a pound”. The game was to get them to describe what they saw. After much conversation, the realisation dawned on them that some saw a “head”, while others were looking at the “tail”.

Being able to hold two opposing ideas in ones mind at once is difficult, but like the coin trick, it enables one to appreciate the wider world, and can lead to an understanding of others viewpoints.

This brings us to the nature of expectation. It pleasant to be reminded of the familiar.
When I gaze at a punnet of fresh strawberries, my taste buds are immediately attuned to the expected flavour. Similarly, a string of onions will conjure up the eye-watering memory of peeling them when preparing a meal. The difficulty is trying to imagine them simultaneously.

Try it yourself; like one of those optical illusions found in children’s books, the minds eye oscillates between “strawberries” and “onions”, the two joined in someway, like “stranions” or “onioberries”, is almost impossible.

Appearances only deceive because of the nature of memory.
We expect familiar things to be consistent; the world would be a difficult place to navigate if they were not. But we are all at the mercy of memory. The “strange” and the “unexpected” do not fit the pattern, and all too often they are discarded, not like the “baby with the bathwater”, but more like “the alien with the wrong clothes”.

Children learn that conformity is comfortable, having the “right” gear, the “right” opinions, makes them if not popular, at least saves them from being picked on. Adults
are sometimes so busy making their way in the world, they have little time to question why they do what they do.

Instead of accepting the world as it is, try asking the question “why not”.
My father steadfastly refused to eat hot and cold food on the same dish. Fruit and vegetables could never be on the same plate, wether cooked or not. It was just not the “done thing”.

Perhaps we are afraid that our cherished beliefs and opinions could be built on nothing more than convention, and to look too closely at opposing viewpoints would make us feel uncomfortable?

This entry was posted on Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 4:24 pm and is filed under essays. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.