This is up on the Knoxville Voice Web site with, as always, many other excellent and informative pieces. Go check it out at:
All Soles Day
Walk a mile in someone else’s less-comfy shoes
by Scott McNutt
Here’s a useful exercise: If a problem needs solving but your brain lobes feel like two lodestones, don’t try to generate a creative spark by banging them together. Instead, approach the problem obliquely. Burst your creative logjam by changing your daily routine.
Take a different route to work and park in a different spot (but not the boss’ space; you’re trying to nurse ideas, not draw unemployment). Drink tea instead of coffee, crawl under your desk and briefly survey the view from down there, and for lunch order a fruit plate instead of that unhealthy crap you generally get. In afternoon meetings, sit in a different place (but be careful in whose lap you end up), and when you get home, bring flowers, kiss your significant other, and say "I love you," instead of your customary, "Hi, what’s for dinner," you lout.
Just kidding with the lout remark. But anyway, jumpstart your creativity by doing things differently to get your brain looking at stuff in new ways. For instance, I’ve varied my routine recently by walking and jogging backwards with our dog, Cody. To be clear, I’ve walked and jogged backwards while Cody and my wife Dana have proceeded forward. Cody jogging backward, now that would be a creative breakthrough.
Dana declined to walk backward. "You should try it, dear," I said to her. "Walking backward will orient you to new perspectives in your head."
"It will orient my butt to the pavement," she replied. "No way."
OK, walking backwards may not be for everyone. But it did help me creatively. It inspired me to write this column. Because walking backward got me thinking about how I am a backward-looking person. The future, to me, is always grim and unpleasant. I hold the future with nothing but foreboding and finality. To move forward is to come to the end, sooner or later.
Going forward walking backward while looking back, back, back into the misty recesses of prehistory in my head, I wondered: How many people have come and gone on our small orb? I looked it up later. According to one estimate, the number of people born on Earth between 50,000 BCE and 2002 CE is one hundred-six billion, four hundred-fifty-six million, three hundred-sixty-seven thousand, six hundred-sixty-nine (106,456,367,669 – yes, the precision slays me too; couldn’t they round up?). Maybe half of those died in infancy or early childhood. (See the article at www.prb.org/Articles/2002/HowManyPeopleHaveEverLivedonEarth.aspx.)
Still moving forward walking backward while looking into the past and pondering my own pessimism, I wondered: If you could ask every person who’d ever been born on Earth, would they be forward-looking or backward-gazing about life? Would living have been worth it to them?
I think if you ask the fifty billion children who never made it out of childhood what they thought about life, they’d all say the same thing: "WAAAAAAH!" Or possibly, "Feed me."
But I know I’m a gloomy soul, so I’m open to other interpretations of what all those dead babies might say. So I was thinking about how optimistic people might be able to find a positive perspective in those brief lives, some hope or inspiration that I simply can’t see. And that’s when I stumbled and almost landed on my ass. That’s also when the idea for All Soles Day kicked me in the seat of the pants.
What if each of us could walk in the shoes of every other of the 106,456,367,669 people born onto our blue world? Don’t you think we might all have a little more empathy for each other? Just trying on 106,456,367,669 pairs of shoes ought to generate a little sympathy. Fitting into all those baby shoes, men going through pair after pair of high heels, women forced to wear ugly work boots – why, I dare say we’d at least all be nicer to shoe salesclerks from now on.
Imagine yourself in the ballet slippers of the little match girl, shivering in the cold, expiring from hunger. All right, she’s a fictional character, but if anyone could draw some sympathy, she could, real or not. But anyway: Try to picture yourself standing in the tattered foot wrappings of some forgotten English peasant woman as she jerked and shuddered, dying of the plague; or in the rotten shoe leather of one of Washington’s soldiers in wintry Valley Forge; or in Jesse Owens’ running shoes as he crushed Hitler’s boasts of racial superiority at the Berlin Olympics – or even in Bozo’s clown shoes for his first telecast. Taking a day to contemplate all the soles of all the souls who have walked or crawled ’round this old ball might do us all some good.
If a day were set aside to imagine how other people have lived through the ages, perhaps we’d each strive to live a little more humbly. If we took the opportunity to experience someone else’s life first-hand (or first-foot), maybe we’d all be a little more respectful of other lives.
And perhaps we’d all be less wrapped up in our own little lives. Because ours are little lives. An average life-span of 75 years is maybe 1/700 of the total time modern humans have existed. Ours is only a tiny flicker of time. Then phht! We’re out. It would behoove us occasionally to pay homage to all those who went before in the other 699/700s.
So maybe All Soles Day would make us appreciate our 1/700 of time here a little more. But if an All Soles Day wouldn’t work for you, then walk backward in your own life until you find something that does. Just remember this lesson I learned: When walking backward, you’re leading with your ass.
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