Fitting In: Life on the Bell Curve

I’m always trying to figure out how I fit into the world, and I think that’s something I share with seven billion other people.

~ Yo-Yo Ma

For those of you who may not know, Yo-Yo Ma is one of the world’s greatest and most highly respected cellists and has been performing around the world since 1961.

If you have asked yourself How do I fit into the world, as I have (I am one of the seven billion people he referred to), you’re in the right place.

One would think that someone like Yo-Yo Ma, who has been performing all his life wouldn’t have to ask that question.

But it is a good question, a right question, and one we all ask. But, why do we ask this question?

Two factors come to mind.

The first is that human beings are hard-wired for connection and that connection is the single most important factor in determining our survival.

The second factor is that each day, we wake up in a different world.

The world of today bears some resemblance, to the world of 10 years ago, but it is very much a different world in many ways.

Each day is truly a new day. The friends of today might not be the friends of tomorrow, our dream job may turn sour and we will want to get out as fast as we can; loved ones may become debilitated by age, and people and pets we love, pass away.

And now, two years into the pandemic, it is clearly a different world than in 2020. Each day we are fitting into a new world.

When I look back over these last two years I can recount many good pleasant, warm, happy, meaningful times with friends and family, as well as professional prosperity.

I can also recount many times of confusion, challenges, disappointments, grief, anger, and apprehension about what was to come next.

Many of the challenges were predicated on the question: How do I deal with this, what is this about, and how or How do I fit into this new situation?

I love to work with young people.

Primarily because finding out how they fit into this world, is their primary task at that age. And, it is a daunting task, given the state of the world today. And, obviously, this process is not limited to adolescents.

I have had many patients, all ages, ask the same question in one way or another: a young woman banned from the church she was born into and devoted her life to; a very successful marketing executive, married, kids, long career, and a good cadre of long-time friends, described his work as “soul-crushing”; a woman in her early forties with a stellar career in business and corporate development, is completely stymied of how to handle a friendship that might turn into a romantic relationship.

These are tales of human existence.

I hope the reader is not predisposed to consider me pessimistic or that I am disparaging human existence in general. Not at all.

I believe life’s challenges are a part of our human experience and, handled properly, bring great personal and collective awakening and meaning; that it is a grand adventure. And an integral part of that adventure is the search for meaning and finding out how we fit into the world.

As many stories go, an adventure starts with a map. So, where is the map for our quest for fitting in?

The previous blog post proposed a context for what we are experiencing today.

This blog offers a view of how change is organized within that grand context. Without context, it would seem chaotic and meaningless. But, fortunately for us, this is not the case.

Introducing The Bell Curve.

Thomas Kuhn was a philosopher of science, a scholar of the field of science if you will.

In 1964 he published the book The Structure of Scientific Revolutions.

While it was written about the ecology of scientific thinking and how fundamental shifts in scientific thinking occur, it has

applications to many other areas, including the dynamics of culture.

From Kuhn’s perspective, we all live somewhere along the line of a bell curve, whether we know it or not. What is a bell curve?

A standard bell curve looks like this:

The bell curve exists throughout nature. If you took 1,000 people and measured their BMI, you would get a bell curve. If you took the same 1,000 people and measured their height, you would again get a bell curve.

Thus, the bell curve is a statistical representation of many characteristics in any population of living creatures.

Kuhn found that this model explains the way in which scientific paradigms generate, mature and pass away. What he was unaware of at the time his book was published (1962), was that this applies as well to any paradigm––of culture, politics, power, etc. and it applies directly to our

world today.

A couple of important points before we move on. You can see it is the innovators who bring their new and “radical” ideas into the system and their innovation propagates into the culture to the right. What’s happening is that the old paradigm is being dropped as the new paradigm makes its way into the culture––with one important exception. The laggards.

Kuhn discovered that the laggards will never change. They have to die off. And when they do, the whole bell curve takes a quantum leap forward. Why is this important?

Many people and most forms of news media and entertainment are focused on the laggards, those folks who will never change and put all their effort into blaming the laggards and trying to change them. This is a waste of time and energy.

So, here is why you’re reading this. Even with the context from the previous blog, today’s world still looks like a great big wedding where everybody got drunk, old feuds flare up and it turns into an all-out brawl on the one hand and one wild party on the other. But, if you want orientation, some sense of direction and purpose, look to the innovators.

Find them, listen to them, and think about what they have to offer. Find where your interest lies, what stimulates your curiosity, what you find most stimulating, and what most incites your imagination.

The message here is, the laggards will never change, so trying to convince them to change, is futile. It’s the innovators and the early adopters where life is happening.

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality.To change something,

build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”

~ Buckminster Fuller

Just like a forest or an ecosystem that becomes fully matured, fire or some other natural event will take it back to where it can start all over again, so it seems with our world at the moment.

It is my hope, and the hope of many others, that the human race doesn’t have to be completely eradicated and start all over again.

From what little I know of the Hopi and Lakota/Sioux prophecies, the human race will (likely) survive.

What it is going to take is innovators, like you, to continue to bring the light of the new paradigm into this world, to make it anew.

Where do we find this light? It has always been there, and those who inspire us, help us to access it and let it

shine.

It was mentioned in the previous blog, that since the world around us is changing so rapidly and in such dire need, it signals a time when we need to look inside ourselves to find the resilience, insight, and direction we have wanted from the world for so long.

Who are the innovators among us today? Here is a very short list to get you started. Some you may recognize and some you may not:

Steve Jobs, Lao Tzu, Satoshi Nakamoto, Madame Curie, Carl Jung, Ada Lovelace, Greta Thunberg, Jon Kabat-Zinn, Brené Brown, Father Thomas Keating, Margaret Heffernan, Richard Semler, Nellie Bly, Wangari Maathai, Julia Lorraine Hill,

…and many more

In closing, I would like to direct you to an article written by a high school student in California entitled Can We Be Hopeful and Courageous in the Face of Climate Change?

Enjoy…