I've been doing a lot of riding around town with my new girl. She's a lot younger and lighter than my last. I enjoy the solitude of biking. Even though I may be on a busy street, weaving between moving and parked cars, I am very much on an island. I'm rarely acknowledged by drivers. Pedestrians, if they look in my direction, rarely acknowledge me. On a bike, I am simply too removed from them. Other bicyclists, what few there are, will typically raise a hand or nod their head in hello but nothing more.
I love this isolation. I love it because I'm an introvert. Sitting in a restaurant with the broken conversations of so many different parties floating to me is like trying to teach an unruly class, too many voices vying to smother my inner one. I hate that. I like my inner one more than the unplanned thoughts that so many people love to share. That's not to say I don't occasionally enjoy a good social outing, but more often I prefer sitting alone to read, to write, or to think. The reading, writing, and thinking always comes out better for me when I'm alone.
For the past eight weeks though I was inundated with groups as a member of Overland. Whether they were groups of students or other camp leaders, I was surrounded by people for two full months. I learned a lot about how groups function generally.
Groups tend to adhere to the loudest, surest voice, regardless if that voice strikes with their own reason. Case in point, we had a student who easily commanded the group's attention because he was confident, tall, and had a deep voice. The other boys were drawn to him, following him out of rooms, quitting activities when he quit, and even liking (or disliking) the same movie or people as him. The other boys did this because he was tall and confident, of all unqualified reasons.
They also did it, I think, because they had no time or opportunity to abscond from the group and be alone. Detaching from the group is seen as a weakness, done out of homesickness or social ineptitude within the group. The student must be an outcast even if he or she is only seeking quiet.
We did everything together as part of the Overland code, and though of course building group cohesion has its place in any context, striving for it constantly meant that these students, for the entirety of their two week trip, hadn't a single moment of privacy to stop and think if their actions and thoughts were uniquely their own or a product of the group.
Susan Cain wrote a book about introversion and then gave a TED talk on the subject, touching on how groups tend to detract from autonomous thought.
I love this isolation. I love it because I'm an introvert. Sitting in a restaurant with the broken conversations of so many different parties floating to me is like trying to teach an unruly class, too many voices vying to smother my inner one. I hate that. I like my inner one more than the unplanned thoughts that so many people love to share. That's not to say I don't occasionally enjoy a good social outing, but more often I prefer sitting alone to read, to write, or to think. The reading, writing, and thinking always comes out better for me when I'm alone.
For the past eight weeks though I was inundated with groups as a member of Overland. Whether they were groups of students or other camp leaders, I was surrounded by people for two full months. I learned a lot about how groups function generally.
Groups tend to adhere to the loudest, surest voice, regardless if that voice strikes with their own reason. Case in point, we had a student who easily commanded the group's attention because he was confident, tall, and had a deep voice. The other boys were drawn to him, following him out of rooms, quitting activities when he quit, and even liking (or disliking) the same movie or people as him. The other boys did this because he was tall and confident, of all unqualified reasons.
They also did it, I think, because they had no time or opportunity to abscond from the group and be alone. Detaching from the group is seen as a weakness, done out of homesickness or social ineptitude within the group. The student must be an outcast even if he or she is only seeking quiet.
We did everything together as part of the Overland code, and though of course building group cohesion has its place in any context, striving for it constantly meant that these students, for the entirety of their two week trip, hadn't a single moment of privacy to stop and think if their actions and thoughts were uniquely their own or a product of the group.
Susan Cain wrote a book about introversion and then gave a TED talk on the subject, touching on how groups tend to detract from autonomous thought.
If you look at the insights of contemporary psychology, it turns out that we can't even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring, mimicking their opinions, even about seemingly personal and visceral things like who you're attracted to. You will start aping the beliefs of the people around you without even realizing that that's what you're doing. And groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room, even though there's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas. Much better for everybody to go off by themselves, generate their own ideas, freed from the distortions of group dynamics, and then come together as a team to talk them through. |
I think e.e. cummings in his quote about being true to yourself actually meant group instead of world: "To be nobody but yourself in a [group] which is doing its best day and night to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight and never stop fighting."
On the last few days at Overland, with all the kids gone, many of the leaders made their pilgrimage to Williamstown where it all began so many weeks before. Between the one-hundred something of us, we had all experienced a wide and significant array of moments that come from being with kids. I heard some of their stories, but more often, as we sat in our heavily populated circles for meals, I heard the same things over and over. I heard how people loved their kids, how they struggled but in the end the group succeeded in rewarding ways, how they were looking forward to leading again next year. It was as if each person feared breaking the mold of routine conversation. I admit, I found myself using similar lines in my own too brief conversations. But it almost felt that as a group, we felt some inexplicable pressure to socialize with as many people as possible rather than to connect with just a few. If two people had detached themselves, sat outside the circle and instead ate and talked alone, why those two would have been considered outliers just as our students who enjoyed solitude were considered outliers.
Now don't get me wrong, I immensely enjoyed leading for Overland. I simply found this group thing so very interesting, especially as an introvert. I think I could learn much from extroverts just as they could learn much from introverts, but to make my case for quiet, I will leave off with one of my favorite quotes from the summer. It's from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, and it's long.
On the last few days at Overland, with all the kids gone, many of the leaders made their pilgrimage to Williamstown where it all began so many weeks before. Between the one-hundred something of us, we had all experienced a wide and significant array of moments that come from being with kids. I heard some of their stories, but more often, as we sat in our heavily populated circles for meals, I heard the same things over and over. I heard how people loved their kids, how they struggled but in the end the group succeeded in rewarding ways, how they were looking forward to leading again next year. It was as if each person feared breaking the mold of routine conversation. I admit, I found myself using similar lines in my own too brief conversations. But it almost felt that as a group, we felt some inexplicable pressure to socialize with as many people as possible rather than to connect with just a few. If two people had detached themselves, sat outside the circle and instead ate and talked alone, why those two would have been considered outliers just as our students who enjoyed solitude were considered outliers.
Now don't get me wrong, I immensely enjoyed leading for Overland. I simply found this group thing so very interesting, especially as an introvert. I think I could learn much from extroverts just as they could learn much from introverts, but to make my case for quiet, I will leave off with one of my favorite quotes from the summer. It's from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams, and it's long.
One of the things Ford Prefect had always found hardest to understand about humans was their habit of continually stating and repeating the very very obvious, as in It's a nice day, or You're very tall, or Oh dear you seem to have fallen down a thirty-foot well, are you all right? At first Ford had formed a theory to account for this strange behavior. If human beings don't keep exercising their lips, he thought, their mouths probably seize up. After a few months' consideration and observation he abandoned this theory in favor of a new one. If they don't keep on exercising their lips, he thought, their brains start working. After a while he abandoned this one as well as being obstructively cynical and decided he quite liked human beings after all, but he always remained desperately worried about the terrible number of things they didn't know about.
-Douglas Adams, Possible Introvert
I read that line and book because of a recommendation from my favorite student from the summer. He wrote an essay about his own affinity for detaching from his friends and being alone in his room. Clearly an introvert like me. So there I go, connecting with the student most like me. God, I'm such a human.