Last Sunday morning, I went for a run early enough to watch the sun rise. It’s the ideal way to explore my new neighborhood, and my path takes me over a bridge, past two farms and a waterfall. This rural New England village is so beautiful that it took all my self-control not to cry. Here’s a small piece of it.
Running is great for mental clarity. It’s especially good as a mechanism for integrating lessons, taking insight and deepening it so that it becomes part of your thinking and reactions. During yesterday’s run, I reflected on how lucky I am and how much my life has changed for the better. I have a comfortable home, located somewhere beautiful. I have a great job that pays well, where I get to do challenging work that I enjoy. And I have the astonishing good fortune that some of the finest people on earth are my friends, and let me learn from them.
Learning from other people — their mistakes and triumphs, their good and bad modeling, their highs and lows — is a skill that can be a superpower.
Here is one of the most valuable things I’ve learned in the last couple of months.
I learned it from one of my dear friends, a semi-famous scientist named Bret Weinstein.
From the beginning of the pandemic, Bret was one of the very few people willing to publicly state that COVID likely escaped from the lab in Wuhan. He and his wife Heather Heying, another semi-famous scientist, said this on Bill Maher back when it was still a “conspiracy theory” proposed only by, the conventional wisdom told us, Alex Jones devotees and anti-Asian racists.
Not that long ago, someone (Nicholas Wade) who met the threshold for social acceptability among the elites wrote a piece arguing that the lab leak hypothesis was plausible. Suddenly, it became okay to talk about it and the theory that should have been the null hypothesis all along, the idea that the virus came from one of the incredibly rare places on earth to conduct such research — places we already knew were dangerous — was being discussed everywhere.
After a morning of scrolling twitter, I was in awe. Many who had lacked the courage to ever say a word about it publicly were saying they knew or suspected that the virus came from the lab all along. Others were acting as if this theory were a revelation, a dawning bit of genius that Nicholas Wade had graciously descended from Mount Olympus to give to mere mortals. Still others were saying how pleased they were that someone who wasn’t one of those (you know, those untidy, Trump loving racists) had finally said this out loud this thing that, if we had started with basic common sense, would’ve been the default assumption we started investigating from, the way that homicide detectives start with spouses or lovers. I do not remember any big shot on Twitter giving Bret any credit. Some fans of his podcast did, linking to the clips where he’d pointed it out long ago, but the cultural elites all acted as if Nicholas Wade was the very first to elucidate this idea.
I thought about my friend Bret, who had put a lot on the line to talk about the plausibility of the lab leak hypothesis for months. I tried to imagine how I would feel in his shoes — if I had been courageous and taken the risk of saying out loud, over and over, something akin to “The emperor is naked, people!” — and upon it becoming widely accepted, none of the elites gave me any credit at all.
I tried very hard, and all I could model was anger.
So I called my friend Bret, and I asked him.
He laughed and said something like, “Pretty amazing how fast the world changes, huh? But no, I’m not upset, Holly. I’m just grateful we might finally get at the truth. The more we know about how this virus originated, the more tools we’ll have to drive it extinct. Ways to reduce the suffering. I’m mostly pleased with this turn of events.”
Bret had no idea — still doesn’t, though he will, when he reads this — that when I hung up the phone, I burst into tears.
Our culture is so degraded, so fully devoted to tribal loyalties and virtue-signaling that one has the right views, that one hates the bad people sufficiently; our culture is such a cesspool, top to bottom, that to see and hear genuine altruism was stunning. This was a private conversation, wherein he could’ve said anything at all — could’ve ranted to his heart’s content — but he was genuinely, sincerely pleased that the most plausible theory as to COVID’s origins was finally being taken seriously, and totally unperturbed that his courage had gone unnoticed.
I can draw pretty well. Most of my ability came to me in a day. Few believe that, but it’s true. A friend who could draw well told me that my problem was that I was trying to draw people and things. Instead, I needed to learn to draw lines and shadows.
The next drawing I finished, compared to the one that my friend studied when she gave me her sage advice, looked as if the artist had taken two or three years of art classes between the two.
A very small paradigm shift can change everything.
From my friend Bret, I learned that real selflessness is a way of seeing the world that makes positive contributions possible. That courage is often both unrewarded and unnoticed, but that it makes everything important, possible. I learned what it looks like when someone who is in life for something other than the aggrandizement of his ego gets to see a change he helped make come to fruition. I learned how a mature adult reacts when slighted—with focus on principles over personalities, and gratitude for the best possible outcome for all, regardless of his personal fortune or misfortune.
I learned something about the kind of person I want to be.
The word ‘privilege’ gets abused these days, but having people in my life who teach me—by example, and without trying— is an actual privilege, and I am grateful.
Some of my new neighbors have planted flowers around the stop sign at the end of the road. Even the most mundane aspects of life can be beautiful if you put in the time and energy to make it so.
If you stop to notice.
If you care about something other than scoring points and taking credit.