Frustrating as it seems, this ingestion of diversity is our path back to trust, which will bring us back to Wholeness, if we can risk the wall of our own skepticism all mortared with our wounds. It is how searching for one thing, you find another, how driving to escape your own thoughts, you come upon a lone heron fifty yards away, and you stare at each other for the longest time until the heron leaves with the only piece of yourself you still want, and now you have to face what’s left, the part of your mind you’ve been avoiding.

But if we manage to avoid ourselves further, the pain hardens and the wall solidifies until our distrust of others contaminates our perception even further. Then, if unresolved, we twist what we see to soothe our pain until, as the Jewish philosopher Martin Büber suggests, “the manufactured has been mixed with the received.” Until what we make up dilutes the truth of what is.

It reminds me of my first fall in love. She left me bruskly. And for such a long time I saw rejection behind every invitation until my ability to perceive kindness was undone, until I began to rationalize the world to muffle my pain, until one day I heard myself conveying my own story falsely, to an innocent stranger, telling how it was I who left her.

Oh why is none of this simple? Why the pull in all directions? Or is it that we are better equipped for experience than understanding, more aptly disposed to the logic of the senses than the physics of the mind? To a Russian, his alphabet is basic; to an American, the Russian word is unrecognizable. To a pilgrim of the heart, the ways of paradox are fundamental; to a pragmatist, foreign and useless. And part of the pilgrim’s protection is the camouflage of uselessness.

This problem is not peculiar to our age. As far back as 300 BC, the Taoist sage Chuang Tzu tells the story of the oldest living tree and how it was scorned by every carpenter as being too gnarled and knotty to be of any use, not even good for firewood. Yet whenever they would leave, the tree, over two hundred feet tall, would boom back with the full power of its voice:

Every other brother that was of use is gone. It is by my not being of use that I survived beyond your axe.

Perhaps the reason our youth are resistant to overly directive education is that they fear being used up as firewood by a society that doesn’t value them. Perhaps we as a society have bred a child who feels that the only way to survive is to be of no use. Perhaps the gnarled and knotty rule has become: to be an individual means to be an outlaw, to grow beyond all recognizable use.