Sunday, April 11, 2021

I just finished the audiobook version of "the HitchHiker's Guide to the Galaxy" by Douglas Adams, Here's two of my takeaways, funneled through the lens of what I needed to hear most this week.

It's absurdly unrealistic to presume that anything in life is going to go the way you expect, (and that this is a good thing).

I've been guilty of giving this advice, but reading Adams's book showed me that the cosmos is so vast and random that, much of the time, it's scary how little our every day concerns matter. Much of the time, we're dragged along like Arthur by Ford into any number of curious, dangerous, or bizarrely serendipitous situations. For example, I learned that a bird watching project I've been assigned as part of my work had a connection to a woman who was written about not only in bird watching books, but also in children's literature by a mother who was published by a publishing company whose sister company happens to be the ones who developed a teaching program that I follow as a part of my volunteer efforts. I could not have orchestrated this, but somehow it all connected. Must be the improbability drive. . . This leads to my second takeaway:

I'm not as smart as I think I am.

The movie version of this book made a big deal about the intelligence of other species on earth, citing that humans were just the third most intelligent with dolphins, our aquatic, mammalian friends, in the position of second. As justification for why this is the case, Adams writes, "Man has always assumed that he is more intelligent than dolphins because he has achieved so much -- the wheel, New York, wars and so on. [. . .] the dolphins had always believed they were far more intelligent than man -- for precisely the same reasons". Moving forward, I'm bound to create many "wheels" and "wars" and perhaps even things as cursed as ketchup popsicles -- which is a purely human concoction as it neither lacks in originality nor good sense. Touting such accomplishments, which are so rarely in my control, is foolish. Instead, the mark of intelligence might actually be "mucking about in the water having a good time" as our dolphin pals have for centuries.