Changes passing by

A few curious things I have been playing with, things you might also find interesting. All in the category of change.

1. A change in working and being worked for

Seen at our local historical museum: an old-time ribbed-metal and wood washboard with an instruction that reads:

Don't rub too hard! Let the board do the work.

Let that bounce around in your mind for a while.

2. A change in moving and being moved

I thought it was a typographical error the first time I saw it. In a Dickens novel he referred to people walking on a city street as "passengers." Then I started seeing it again and again. Here's an example from Oliver Twist:

It was within an hour of midnight. The weather being dark, and piercing cold, he had no great temptation to loiter. The sharp wind that scoured the streets, seemed to have cleared them of passengers, as of dust and mud, for few people were abroad, and they were to all appearance hastening fast home.

From The Old Curiosity Shop:

It was the beginning of a day in June; the deep blue sky unsullied by a cloud, and teeming with brilliant light. The streets were, as yet, nearly free from passengers, the houses and shops were closed, and the healthy air of morning fell like breath from angels, on the sleeping town.

Clearly these "passengers" are not riding but walking. In some places, where Dickens has need to speak of carriages and coaches, he amends the simple "passengers" to "foot-passengers," as in this quote from Nicholas Nickleby:

Presently, the coach came; and, after many sorrowful farewells, and a great deal of running backwards and forwards across the pavement on the part of Miss La Creevy, in the course of which the yellow turban came into violent contact with sundry foot-passengers, it (that is to say the coach, not the turban) went away again, with the two ladies and their luggage inside; and Newman, despite all Mrs Nickleby's assurances that it would be his death--on the box beside the driver.

My guess is that in Dickens' time the separation between conveying oneself (passenger as passer-by) and being conveyed (passenger as cargo) was just beginning to be required. The online etymology dictionary says the conveyance meaning ("one traveling in a vehicle or vessel") was "attested" (in use?) as early as the 1500s. But certainly Dickens must not have felt it was confusing to his readers to use the term to mean people walking by as late as the mid-1800s.

In our time nobody would ever refer to someone walking as a passenger, or even as a foot-passenger. It would simply make no sense. The word now means being fully conveyed. A free online dictionary describes a passenger as "a traveler riding in a vehicle (a boat or bus or car or plane or train etc) who is not operating it." Apparently there is also a slang use of the word as "a member of a group or team who is a burden on the others through not participating fully in the work." If something has gone all the way into metaphor, it's pretty firmly situated in its meaning; it has to be for the metaphor to work.

What does it mean that we now see ourselves as not moving but moved? I don't know, but it must mean something.

3. A change in knowing and being known

We have recently been watching The Andy Griffith Show on Netflix. It is simply fascinating. The other day we saw an episode about privacy and information, called "Stranger in Town" (Season 1 Episode 12), that anybody who is interested in society in the age of the internet will want to watch. It sets all sorts of mental gears turning.

I'll give you a brief synopsis. A man shows up in Mayberry, Ed Sawyer. He is a complete stranger, but he knows many details about everyone in town: names, habits, quirks. The townspeople respond with some distrust and fear, though they are mostly too mystified to know how to react. Is he a spy? An alien? A Hollywood agent? A long-lost relative? Someone with a loose screw? In the end, as usual, Andy the sheriff calms everyone down and finds out the innocent cause of the mystery. Turns out Ed heard all about Mayberry from an Army buddy of his who was born there. When he left the Army he found he liked the place so much that he renewed his buddy's subscription to the local newspaper. That's how he knew about everybody and everything. Once Andy explains the situation everyone welcomes the nice, if over-eager, man to the town, and he settles in.

What I found amazing about this episode was how I felt watching it. You might think that in this day and age I would find Ed Sawyer's ability to find out a paltry amount of information about people quaint and pleasant. Surprisingly, I felt more alarmed at the state of affairs (in the first part of the show) than the townspeople did! At one point Opie (Andy's 5-year-old son) ran out of the sheriff's office onto the sidewalk, and I had a strong emotional reaction: Don't let Opie go out alone with a stalker like that hanging around! The whole thing was almost like a twilight-zone episode, it felt so creepy. It felt even creepier that Andy (the law) was so accepting of the stalker. Evidently in the 60s such a plot was seen as television-cute (as all of the other Mayberry plots have been so far). It does not seem so now. My guess is that because we all know how people can find out lots about each other, we can link it more strongly and obviously to intent: negative intent, nasty intent. And apparent evidence of negative intent is more alarming than any mystery.

That's how I felt, anyway, watching it. I'm curious to know how other people watching that show today would feel. If you watch it, or have watched it, tell me how it seemed to you.

Catalysis

People: I am writing this post wearing my Firefly t-shirt. Meaning: it is a Day of Great and Courageous Challenge. (Yes I am that much of a nerd.)

Today, after many months of toil, I finally released a more-complete-yet-still-incomplete version of my monster of a book, Working with Stories. The two catalysis chapters (basic and advanced) are in it, coming to about 120 pages together. All the chapters now have summaries, questions and activities for self-study. Many parts have been re-read and cleaned up. References have been collected and an improved "further reading" section has been written. The Scrivener-Word-PDF mangle has been dealt with, for better production next time.

What's left to do? Chapters on sensemaking, intervention and return, all of which should be far shorter than what I have written so far. More notes on case studies to be cleaned up into prose. A few more diagrams and pictures. Indexing and preparation for print and Kindle self-publishing.

If you like this book, or you like the idea of this book, or you have told me in the past that you would like to help me finish this book, now is the time to step forward. As I finish the book over the next (cough cough) months, I am in desperate need of two things, which only you can supply.

1. Encouragement. To a person undertaking a years-long effort like this one, the work can seem like mining deep in the dark for jewels that may or may not exist when brought into the light. My biggest obstacle at this point is the need to maintain belief in the book's right to exist, which rests entirely on its utility. I know the book itself still wants to be finished -- it has told me so -- but I am no longer sure the world wants the book to be finished. If the world were to tell me it wants the book to be finished, I would gain much energy to keep mining.
2. Discouragement. Self-published, self-edited books are always too long. At more than 700 pages, even without the several chapters yet to come, I know the book has grown into a monster. But I just can't choose parts to cut out! All the sections have such cute little faces! You, my readers, can do what I cannot. Please tell me which parts are not useful, because I am incapable of performing this service for myself. Clarity and utility are at risk, I tell you. The book is poised to eat itself. Someone must take an axe to it, for its own good. All reasonable opinions will be gratefully, greedily accepted.

That's it! I would say "watch this space for updates" but really, you must have far better things to do. When I have more to say I'll make some noise. Count on it.

What makes a good story listener?

A correspondent was recently reading over old emails and found an answer I wrote to a question he posed about a year ago. He thought other people might find it useful, so he suggested I post it. The context was: my correspondent wanted to hire people who could collect stories, and he also wanted to hire people who could train people to collect stories. The question he asked was, "What makes a good story listener?" Here is what I wrote.

The first thing in finding people who can work with stories is that they have to think in stories. I used to think everybody did this but have come to the conclusion that it is like handedness: some do and some don't, and all points in between.

To explain what I mean: I am [was at the time] preparing a blog post that refers to an advertisement I saw in a magazine last week that had two juxtaposed photographs in it [it was this post]. I saw the advertisement and my eyes went straight to the photos, which I scrutinized heavily and got very excited about. There was some writing on the bottom of the page but I mostly ignored that. I brought the magazine to my husband to show him the exciting photographic juxtaposition. He completely ignored the photos and went straight to the sweepstakes scheme described, which to him was amazing. (After he explained it to me, it was amazing to me too, but I didn't notice it until he explained it.)

If I was hiring somebody to compare photographs, I'd hire me. If I was hiring somebody to evaluate schemes and plans, I'd hire my husband. So, you want people who notice stories the way I notice pictures and the way my husband notices schemes and plans.

It's almost like the world has many beings swimming around in it, but for some people whole species are transparent while others are solid. One person can see the stories perfectly but can't make out the opinions, and somebody else can see the opinions but the stories are just thin shimmers of light. If you watch people tell and listen to stories, you can tell pretty quickly whether they think in stories or not. Do stories come out of them all the time? Do they ask the kinds of questions that result in stories? Or do they ask other questions?

But I'm not sure about curiosity as it applies to story listening. I've known some incurious people who did a great job collecting stories, and I've met some curious people who couldn't let things flow. Listening to stories is a sort of yin skill, receptive not creative. Some of the best storytellers are the worst story listeners. I myself have to work pretty hard at listening, at least to people. With people I am always thinking of what I would like to say next. Strangely in nature I don't do that, maybe because I am more respectful and humble. That is why I was a better ethologist than cultural anthropologist. It is also why I like to work with stories other people solicited, because I can't rush in and ruin things.

I would say useful qualities for a story listener are patience, the ability to keep quiet and listen, the ability to observe and notice, the ability to build trust, the ability to help people feel safe to talk. Have you ever met a person who everybody tells them things they had not meant to say? I have met a few people like that, where I just spill things out because I can somehow feel they create good places for stories to come to rest. Stories flock to them. A good test is, when you talk to the person do you find yourself saying, I don't usually tell people this but... If you find yourself censoring your speech instead, that person is not going to be a good story collector. I would venture that everybody on earth can name a person stories gather round and a person stories keep a safe distance from.

So yin curiosity is perfect, but yang curiosity can ruin things by turning everything into an inquisition or probing experiment. Meaning, curiosity is useful if it means people can wait and see what unfolds. It is not useful if it means people can't stand to wait and try to force things through taking action. Great story listeners practice wu wei, or doing by not doing.

Also, rigor and punctuality can actually be quite useful because it can put people at ease: it communicates stability. I'd rather tell my story to somebody who is following a routine they know well than to somebody who might throw away the rules any second. Some of the best people who do oral histories are plodding sorts. Their arms are open, but not reaching.

So now, if you want to look for somebody who can train people to do that. I would say, all of that plus a strong ability to introspect. Because they have to know why what they do works, how to explain how it works, how to tell if other people are doing it, how to help other people do it, and how to help other people fix things when it isn't working. And also how to tell if people will not be able to do it and should give up and try something else.

To give an example, I've now taken three organized yoga classes. The second teacher was a dancer, and she seemed to assume we could all bend our bodies into pretzels. I got hurt trying to do what she did and had to quit the class. She probably didn't even notice. The third teacher was just learning yoga herself and, though she was enthusiastic and meant well, she only knew one way to do yoga. She didn't know why what worked for her worked or why what didn't work for any of us didn't. She was not that much better than a taped presentation.

My first yoga teacher, on the other hand, was amazing. She knew yoga inside and out, but most importantly she could look at anybody in the class, or place her hand on your arm, and know instantly how what you were doing was working for you or wasn't, and how to fix it so it did work. Sometimes I would be struggling and failing, and she could come over and make one tiny adjustment and suddenly everything would fall into place, and then explain why it fell into place so I understood. That was a great teacher. So, I guess a good trainer for story listening is good at story listening, and good at listening to the story of story listening. If that makes sense!

How would I engineer an interview to find such people? I would ask them to do this, over the course of ten or fifteen minutes:

1. tell a few stories while I listen
2. ask a third person to tell a few stories (and listen to them and maybe fill out a form)
3. watch somebody else do what they did in step two
4. talk about what happened in the first three parts

A person who is good for the job will be able to come up with insightful observations in all four sections:

1. about their own stories
2. about the stories they listened to
3. about the stories the other person listened to
4. about the whole process of telling and listening and its variations in the first three parts

If you go through that whole thing and the person doesn't notice anything, they aren't going to be able to listen to stories well or train anybody to do it well. Like my second and third yoga teachers, they will not know what is working and what is not, nor where to lay their hand to fix what is not working, nor how to explain why they laid their hand there then.

Of course that bar may be set too high, but you should be able to see differences among people by having them all do this. I have met people who would notice twenty useful things during that ten minutes, and I have met other people who would notice nothing. It's curiosity but of a particular flavor. A yang-curious person might not be able to wait until the end and would blunder in to force an outcome without producing understanding - like it was a machine to be fixed - but a yin-curious person would notice things that would help people improve their own skills.

As to resumes and curricula vitae, it's hard to tell. People write what they think they are supposed to write, which is generally not stories [Note: see the work of Kathy Hansen at A Storied Career for more on resumes and interviewing and stories]. I guess it would be useful to look for things they have done that show attention, patience, receptivity, noticing, yin-curiosity.

Watching. You want good watchers, and good watchers of watching.

As usual, hope it's useful! And thanks for the suggestion and the great question, correspondent!

shhhhhh

Hm. It has been so long since I posted on this blog that Blogger changed the editing screen on me. Tells you something, doesn't it?

I just wanted to update anybody who might be wondering what I've been up to. I finished the catalysis chapter! I was all ready to post it about two weeks ago, but then I took a good look at what I have written so far. I realized it would be silly to put up another chapter without fixing all the "to be completed" bits in the previous chapters. So I've been going through and fixing things, including making sure every chapter has nice textbook-style end matter: summary, questions for discussion, activities, references cited, annotated recommendations for further reading. Nice and clean. Also, I'm fixing up all the places where I say "see page xx" where the "xx" means "put in some way to link pages later." Later is now.

With the catalysis chapter, I have finished 15 chapters out of an expected 22. It's mostly downhill from here. The hardest chapters have been written, and for what remains (sensemaking, intervention, and return, basic and advanced, plus the rest of the case studies) I have lots of notes to work from. The basic intervention chapter will consist of three excellent interviews with colleagues who know more about the use of narratives in that sphere than I do. (If you are one of those three colleagues: thanks so much for your help, sorry it has taken so long to get your stuff in the book, and I still promise to send you what you said so you can check it before it goes in!)

The catalysis chapter did take forever, but lots of other things have been going on that have slowed things down. My husband took on a new job that reduces my time flexibility somewhat. I've been working half time since 2003, but now it's even more half-time than the half-time it was before. Our family's homeschooling journey has been ramping up in ambition and scope as my son gets older. Also, our two very old dogs are going through their last few months with us, and our house has been transformed into a 24/7 dog hostel as we see our friends through to the end of their days.

So when will the book be done? When it's done, I guess. I've had this fantasy of showing up at the family Christmas party with real, physical copies of the book to give to my family members ... for the past three Christmases. Maybe I'll make it this year. I hope people can get some benefit out of the book even in its incomplete state, which is partly why I decided to clean up what I have before I write the rest of the chapters.

Why haven't I been writing in the blog? I've been kind of pondering whether I should still have a blog. I started the blog to write the book. (And I don't know why ... she swallowed the fly.) The blog has helped the book, but the blog has hurt the book too. Now maybe it's time for the blog and the book to part company. When the book is done the blog will have no stated reason to exist, so why continue it?

Another thing is, having a blog can be a pain. Every thing that happens you think: good blog material? Just a few mornings ago I woke up from a bad dream. In the dream I was at a conference somewhere, and I had been asked to give a talk on "Learning How To Learn." I sparkled, I engaged, I inspired. I had no idea what I was talking about. Then I woke up from the dream, and instantly a thought sprung into my head: good blog material? And then: stop doing that! Life is life, not blog material!

Another thing is, I've done a lot of opining in the blog. I didn't start the blog intending to opine, but the opinions kept sneaking in anyway. I don't think I like that. If I want to write an opinion blog I should start a different blog. I should call it "The Hand-Wringing Declinist" or "The Decline and Fall of the Way Things Were When I Was a Kid." That sort of place would be the right place to tell people the world is going to hell in a hand-basket, instead of sneaking in "and wouldn't you know, this is all about stories!" into each post. Then when I think of starting an opinion blog I think: let's not and say we did.

Whadya think?

Lonely for ...

So yesterday I get in the mail the New Yorker and the Atlantic Monthly, and it's a double dose of loneliness in one day. The Atlantic has an article called "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?" while in the New Yorker it's "The Disconnect." I read these with interest, partly because I've been writing similar things about how we don't tell each other stories as much as we used to.

Even though I'm generally in the choir on these things, I can't help but notice something is missing, and it's the same thing I see missing from every prominent declaration of the new loneliness. Consider this quote from John Cacioppo, "the world’s leading expert on loneliness."

“Forming connections with pets or online friends or even God is a noble attempt by an obligatorily gregarious creature to satisfy a compelling need,” he writes. “But surrogates can never make up completely for the absence of the real thing.” The “real thing” being actual people, in the flesh. 

Wait: "the real thing" means people, and only people? Every non-human contact can only be a "surrogate" for human contact? Do these people realize what they are saying?

The human species has been around for at least a million years. Up to about a hundred years ago the majority of people were habitually conversant with the natural world, or, as it was then known, the world. If we redefine loneliness in terms of human contact only -- by saying we can only be considered lonely if we are lonely for people -- we risk ignoring a source of loneliness that might be even more powerful.

Imagine a world full of people, a world in which nobody is ever lonely ... for people. But in this new world it is possible to live an entire life without seeing one leaf, hearing one bird, touching one pebble, feeling one raindrop or gust of wind. If we can no longer be lonely for life itself, are we still alive?

The frog interview

I just got back from a social outing. Our pond is a frog pond, and it's getting to be time for the frogs to lay their eggs in the water. Every year I try to catch the frogs in the act of laying their eggs, and every year I miss the event and discover the egg sacs already there, anchored to branches under the water. So this afternoon, mindful of the time, I started out walking from the house.

Halfway there a red squirrel sounded the alarm: large animal coming! But this guy didn't just sound the alarm: they never do. He conversed with me. He stared straight at me, chittering, stamping, running up and down the tree, defying me to come closer. To each move I made he responded, escalating the tension. Finally I moved away (toward the pond, where I was going in the first place) and he sounded a triumphant call. I've been accosted thus by many a proud squirrel, and I defy you to say they intend nothing communicative by it. When we started on our project to build a playhouse a few years ago, I was leveling the space and laying out concrete blocks for the foundation when a squirrel came within a few feet of my face and delivered a five-minute lecture on the proper occupation of space in the forest. I listened with respect, and I have recalled that lecture many a time as I made sure our construction avoided presenting any hazards to our neighbors in that part of the woods.

Getting back to today. As I approached the pond I could hear the frogs going at it: a complicated chorus of calls was sounding back and forth as they negotiated the deposition of eggs and sperm into the right places. I was excited to have gotten closer than ever to the event of egg laying. I stood for a long time just listening. I could see little ripples on the pond where the frogs were dancing together; but I wanted to see more. I tried to advance quietly, but of course they heard me and stopped singing. I knew what to do next. I walked up quickly and sat down in my pond-watching spot, ready to participate in the frog interview. Time passed. A different squirrel started up a different confrontation, not towards me but towards some other ne'er-do-well, perhaps a deer, off somewhere past the pond. Flies buzzed around. Trees sung songs.

At some point I realized the interview had begun. A frog had swum up right in front of me and was staring directly at me. Now we began the formal process. I knew that I was to prove myself by remaining stock still for as long as was required; meaning, until the frog moved. Frogs are the absolute masters of stock-still, so I knew the challenge was difficult. The first frog that came up was a young, small one. After a relatively short staring session it swam off, apparently satisfied with my performance. Then a larger, more authoritative frog swam up and began the stare. This time I simply could not make it. Three times I tried and three times I failed. My fingers got numb, or my toe got jammed into my boot tip, and I simply had to move. The interviewing frog immediately spun around in the water and disappeared: interview over. By the way, to the uninitiated the interviewing frog would have seemed to be doing nothing but floating in the water, seemingly dead or unconscious. When the wind moved the water the frog moved with it like a floating twig. But I noticed that no matter which way the wind blew, the frog carefully and subtly bent its body so that its eyes never strayed from mine. During these three failed interviews I could see other frogs off across the pond, waiting and watching to see how the interview would turn out. A few times they even started up with a few hesitant croaks, but the interviewer declined to respond with an all-clear, so they continued to wait. Finally, sensing their rising impatience with my ineptitude, I rose to leave. I'll come back tomorrow, ready to try again.

I don't blame the frogs for being suspicious; I've seen what happens to them. Every year there are millions and millions of tadpoles. You can pick them up and run them through your fingers. Later in the year the numbers thin to thousands, and a year later there can't be more than twenty or thirty frogs in the pond. Some of them go elsewhere: we find the travelers roaming about looking for new ponds to settle, and sometimes give them a lift across a dry spot. But many must be eaten. That's another event I've wanted to see. I'm sure some kinds of birds must eat the tadpoles, and I've come to the pond at the time when this should be happening, but I always miss it. I see birds coming and drinking, but never dining. To cross that boundary I must surely endure additional interviews of an even more demanding nature.

I defy anyone to claim that the social experience I just described contains nothing but "surrogate" forms of sociality. For nearly the entire run of human existence, interacting only with other human beings has been an aberration, a deadness, a loss: loneliness.

Strange games

Here's Henry David Thoreau in Walden:

You only need sit still long enough in some attractive spot in the woods that all its inhabitants may exhibit themselves to you by turns. 

Later he describes a game of tag he played with a loon that sounds a lot like my frog interview.

He manoeuvred so cunningly that I could not get within half a dozen rods of him. Each time, when he came to the surface, turning his head this way and that, he coolly surveyed the water and the land, and apparently chose his course so that he might come up where there was the widest expanse of water and at the greatest distance from the boat. It was surprising how quickly he made up his mind and put his resolve into execution. He led me at once to the widest part of the pond, and could not be driven from it. While he was thinking one thing in his brain, I was endeavoring to divine his thought in mine. It was a pretty game, played on the smooth surface of the pond, a man against a loon.

I'll bet you twenty dollars that when Thoreau wrote that, any random person would have had a dozen stories to tell just like it in response. Not so today. But nobody ever says anything about that kind of loneliness.

You may have seen news articles about a man named Robert Biggs, who claims to have been saved from an attack by a mountain lion ... by a bear. A wild bear. According to Mr. Biggs, he had known the bear for a long time, having hiked the same trail for decades. He believes the bear saved him because it knew him and considered him a friend. There have been documented cases of wild animals helping people before, mostly dolphins and apes; so while I can't possibly know what happened to Mr. Biggs I concede the possibility. What I find amazing about this story, though, is the nasty tone of the many deriding comments about it. Here are a few fairly representative comments:

This is a really cool story. But he left out the part aliens fought off the bear before he time travelled from la la land.

So he was attacked by a duck, and a rabbit saved him? I don’t blame him for embellishing, the last time I was attacked by a duck I had to use martial arts. They are blood thirsty.

If I ran across a mountain lion and a bear, I would use my secret Dim Muk Kung Fu moves to immobilize them for 30 minutes with my deadly one finger touch. 

One thing I've noticed about the comments on this story are that many of them involve fantastic or gaming elements: aliens, magic, mind-altering substances. The idea of interacting with wild animals is evidently so far outside of "normal human" experience that people have to refer to things they know better: movies and computer games. As a visiting kid said one time while we splashed in our local river, "This is just like a movie!" High praise indeed.

Visitors in our own world

The stories of my frog interview, Thoreau's loon game and Mr. Bigg's bear all contrast with the presentation of nature I see in campaigns imploring people to "visit" and "see" nature. Have you noticed those ubiquitous posters in which children stare wide-eyed at butterflies? Have you noticed that the children are never doing anything? It's almost as if nature has turned into a museum of nature, an abstraction of itself, an idea without a reality. People who "visit" nature expect to see things, and they might even hope to see things happen, but they don't expect to have things happen to them.

Even though I grew up in the country and should know better, I have found this nature-as-theatre idea taking root in my own expectations. I find myself constantly surprised to discover that nature doesn't just sit there as I watch it. It jumps up and plays with me. Squirrels chastise me, birds surround me, hawks survey me, deer watch me, grouse fly from me (from me!), bears assess my motivations. I can't stand back and watch: I'm drawn in, engaged, included. It's not a zoo, it's a world. It's the world. It is the same world as it was before. The only change is that we have somehow got the idea that we don't belong here anymore, that we are visitors in our own world. It's no wonder we are lonely.

People say people are lonely, and they think people are lonely for other people. But what if people are lonely for more than just people? What if they are lonely for life itself? And what if life is lonely for us, and misses us?

Which is worse: the loss of the gift you miss, or the loss of the gift you have forgotten you ever had?

P.S. David Abram's book The Spell of the Sensuous says much of what I said here, and better too.

P.P.S. Having finished this post, I went to have dinner and noticed my copy of The Atlantic sitting open to the picture for the article "Is Facebook Making Us Lonely?" Guess what the picture shows. It's a man and woman holding hands while looking away from each other at computer tablets. But look beyond the man and woman. Guess what they are standing in. Are they in a yard? In a forest? On a hill? Near the sea? Nope. They are in an empty space, blank, devoid of all life. Seems pretty lonely to me, people or no people.

P.P.P.S. The next morning this post sounds all show-off-y, holier-than-thou, I have a pond and you don't. But you don't have to live in the woods to reconnect to life. The world is so lonely for us that even a little potted plant will be your friend if you let it. My favorite cartoon of all time (surpassing even the Far Side explanation of dinosaur extinction) is one I saved from a newspaper a long time ago. It showed a very old man sitting on a bench in a giant concrete city, conversing happily with a tiny flower growing through a crack in the sidewalk. Nature is good company.