A Whack on the Side of the Head, Randomness, Hurricane Katrina, and Imbuing Life with Meaning

Twenty-two years ago, a classmate recommended that I read Roger von Oech's A Whack on the Side of the Head: How You Can Be More Creative. I finally got around to reading it and finished it on Friday night.

I enjoyed it a lot. Of course, as von Oech points out near the end of the book, unless a person applies the principles he teaches here, reading it doesn't mean much. That's a good point to remember any time we read a good book.

I was especially interested in the chapter on embracing the creative possibilities in ambiguity. In one section there, von Oech talks about allowing randomness foster creativity. Included was this story and moral:

There once was an Indian medicine man whose responsibilities included creating hunting maps for his tribe. Whenever game got sparse, he'd lay a piece of fresh leather out in the sun to dry. Then he'd fold and twist it in his hands, say a few prayers over it, and smooth it out. The rawhide was now crisscrossed with lines and wrinkles. The medicine man marked some basic reference points on the rawhide, and--presto!--a new game map was created. The wrinkles represented new trails the hunters should follow. When the hunters followed the map's newly defined trails, they invariably discovered abundant game.

Moral: By allowing the rawhide's random folds to represent hunting trails, he pointed the hunters to places they previously had not looked.

One of the Beatles once observed, "There's a lot of random in our songs." In fact, the Beatles, perhaps because their high and virtually unprecedented climb to the "toppermost of the poppermost" was so mysterious and inexplicable, almost worshiped at the Church of Random.

Paul McCartney tells the story of when he was first playing Hey Judefor his songwriting partner, John Lennon. After singing the line, "the movement you need is in your shoulder," he stopped, looked up from the piano at which he was sitting, and told Lennon, "I'll be takin' that out." It was a line that had just come to him while fumbling through the melody and chords of the song. But when McCartney shared his intention to excise it from the song, Lennon was incredulous. "What for?" he asked. "It's nonsense. It sounds like a parrot," McCartney explained. Lennon however, was insistent. "I know what it means!" he told McCartney. The line stayed in, even though to this day, McCartney can't really explain what the words mean. Nor can the millions of us who sing along with it every time we hear it on the radio or MP3 players. But it seems to fit and seems to mean something.

Von Oech suggests that we force ourselves to be creative by associating whatever problem we're trying to deal with at any given time with some randomly-selected "oracle."

This means looking for "right answers"--and von Oech believes that there can be many "right answers"--in seeming disconnected or incongruous places.

A few of his suggestions for possible "oracles": the sixth word on a given page of the dictionary, the product being promoted in the twelfth full-page ad in a magazine, the second yellow object you see when you look out your window, and so on.

The idea is to climb out of the ruts into which we can be stuck when we're trying to solve a problem or come to an understanding of life. Flip the channel. Turn the page. Look at things through a different window.

I personally believe that we always learn by metaphor. By using "random" thinking, connecting the issues we're trying to solve, the product we want to create, the presentation we need to make, or the goal we want to attain with some other object or word or idea, we break the constraints of conventionality and come up with new ideas. A different metaphor helps us see things we might not otherwise have seen.

Actually, the idea of randomness in life fits with my understanding of Christian faith. Often, I hear people say, "Everything happens for a reason." People seem to say this to console themselves and others in the face of life's tragedies or disappointments. "Everything happens for a reason," they intone. I suppose that in some sense, that may be true. But in the end, I simply don't buy it.

I don't believe that everything that happens in life happens for a reason...unless we supply the reason.

For example, I don't believe Hurricane Katrina was something God caused to happen out of some inscrutable divine plan.

The Bible teaches that we live in a fallen creation that creeks and groans under the burden of human sin. (By sin here, I'm referring to that condition of alienation from God, others, and our true selves into which the whole race falls. We commit individual sins because of the human condition called sin. The whole creation is under the burden of human sin because human beings are the pinnacle of God's creation, created in God's image. Our fall has impacted all the rest of creation.)

God didn't create tragedy. But when the natural order is thrown into disorder, which is what is the case because of sin, nature turns against itself and turns to against human beings. In other words, hurricanes are random events that happen.

No wonder that eminent theologian, Jimmy Buffett, argues, "They're ain't no way to reason with hurricane season." I'd paraphrase him by saying, "Not even hurricane season happens for a reason."

But, we can by the ways in which we respond to the random events of life, imbue them, supply them, fill them with meaning and purpose. Imagine...

A church, stirred by the love of Christ, to raise money, send supplies, and gather volunteers to love their neighbors by helping with relief efforts in Alabama, Mississippi, or Louisiana. Or...

A young woman, witnessing the destruction, vowing to become a doctor so that she can help hurting people. Or...

A boy deciding that when he grows up, he will be an engineer and find ways to prevent people from being killed by flooding. Or...

A city opening up its collective heart to the impoverished homeless from the Gulf Coast, integrating their children into their finest local schools, affording them the opportunities for new chances and better futures than they might have had if the hurricane hadn't come.

Or...you imagine.

We can imbue the random events that arise in this world with great purpose and meaning when, by faith and in prayer, employing the mental faculties God has given to us and relying on Him, we seek for ways of expressing love for God and love for neighbor in creative ways.

Please don't think that in saying this, I'm trying to repeal the petition of the Lord's Prayer that says, "Your will be done." When we pray that prayer, we ask the God we know through Jesus Christ to bring grace, love, wisdom, and purpose into the world and into our lives. We submit the present and surrender the future to God's activity in our lives. As is often said, "God is a gentleman." God never goes where not invited. But when we do invite God to help us face the randomness of life, God will use us and the circumstances into which we've invited Him to bring good meaning and eternal purposes to the fore. History is moving toward a goal. Christ will return. God will bring an end to life on this planet. Until then, as we live and act in concert with God, we bring order and love, meaning and purpose to the world's randomness.

I like von Oech's book. I'm able to connect it with my faith in Christ and the Biblical world view. But I think everybody, whatever their world view, might get a good whack on the side of the head from it.

[For more on topics addressed in this post, you might want to look here.]