Disturbing the World
You Tweak the World, and the World Tweaks You Back
The phrase comes from author Ann Patchett. I don’t know if it’s from a novel or an interview or an article. And I don’t know how long ago I came across it. But it struck a chord that has never stopped vibrating.
The question is whether or not you choose to disturb the world around you or if you choose to let it go on as if you had never arrived.
I have some history of disturbing the world around me going back to preschool days. When I was much younger, my perception was that the world around me was pretty easily disturbed—and by and large it didn’t like it one damn bit. I never much cared about that, though. The alternative—letting the world go on as if I had never arrived—was dead on arrival, unthinkable, pointless, completely unsatisfying. If asked then, I doubt I could even have imagined anyone making that choice voluntarily. And from a young age, I had a reputation of being disturbing.
The disturbances I caused were never the result of an intention to disturb or disrupt, though. So maybe it was more a matter of not trying to not disturb the world.
I wasn’t rebellious. I was just living my life, which might involve hanging out with the wrong kids or dating the wrong guys or going places I wasn’t supposed to go or asking questions I wasn’t supposed to be asking. But I didn’t do those things because I was told not to do them. Often I didn’t discover until after the fact that I was in violation of some norm of behavior someone else subscribed to. That was never a persuasive reason for me to stop doing something I wanted to do or start doing something I didn’t want to do. I was quite willing to lie to my mother once I figured out that, absent a reason to do so, she wouldn’t make an effort to investigate what I was up to. What she didn’t know didn’t hurt her—or me.
It’s All Relative
That’s because, ironically, of my father, my mother, my two brothers, and me, I was—at least through high school—the most “solid citizen” member of the family. My father was a philanderer (I don’t actually know whether I have two half-siblings or three); my mother had an affair with a Catholic priest and once chased one of my brothers through the house with a hammer; that brother, on another occasion, threatened to shoot her with a rifle; my youngest brother stole my friend’s bike while he was visiting me and gave it to his girlfriend. After the bike was recovered by the police, I was deemed the bad guy just for saying out loud that I hoped he got arrested. Which I did. Fervently. My hammer-wielding mother and rifle-aiming brother were concerned about how his arrest would reflect on them.
When I was in high school, I had a part-time job at the library. One of the tasks was shelving books on the main floor and also upstairs in “the stacks.” Over time some shelves in the stacks had gotten jam-packed with books, while others had lots of empty space. I offered to rearrange the books so all of them could be easily retrieved or shelved. My supervisor approved the idea. Why wouldn’t she? I had volunteered to do a tedious but obviously necessary job.
When the Head Librarian discovered what I had done, however, she reprimanded my supervisor and made her return the books to their previous locations. It had slipped out that rearranging the books had been my idea, and it was not my place as a mere “student helper,” as we were called, to have any ideas whatsoever. I hadn’t just disturbed the books on the shelves—which needed disturbing in order to be accessible—I had disturbed someone’s idea of the natural order of things.
So I learned that there were transgressions—and then there were transgressions. Meaning there were transgressions that were generally accepted or understood or explainable (philandering, threats of violence, and theft, for example). I didn’t commit those kinds of transgressions. My behavior was always, to me, quite logical. But to my immediate family and to some neighbors, classmates, and one head librarian, logic didn’t enter into it. They didn’t understand me or approve of what I was doing, and that was disturbing to them.
Other People Are Disturbing
I got a really severe case of mono from a Jewish gay guy I was friends with who agitated for the two of us to get married and move to Boston. He had a great sense of humor and we had similar tastes in literature. I considered the offer but declined. I dated a black guy whose extended family lived in Georgia; he said he wanted me to meet them but we couldn’t travel together in that state. We used to sit in his Buick Skylark late at night, drinking coffee, and talk about living in the country one day, having at least half a dozen kids, and owning a wood-paneled station wagon. (Don’t ask; I have no idea what that was about.) He was a sweetheart with a fabulous smile and one of the most conventional people I knew, but I was ostracized by my family for going out with him.
It was quite stunning to me to discover that people could be a source of disturbance to others simply by being who they were, simply by existing. My friend Terry’s gayness was a disturbance to his parents. Plus it was the 60s; he was not “out.” My boyfriend Henry’s blackness was a disturbance to my family and to some of my friends—and no doubt to many others. The existence of Jews was a disturbance to the Nazis. The existence of immigrants is a disturbance to many people in the U.S. and other countries. The existence of Palestinians is a disturbance to Zionists. The existence of Muslims is a disturbance to Islamophobes. The existence of blacks is a disturbance to white supremacists.
I’ve said and written elsewhere that the bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, in which four young girls were killed, made an indelible impression on me. I was extremely disturbed by that event. Hearing Nina Simone sing “Strange Fruit” for the first time was profoundly, profoundly disturbing. I’m disturbed by the violent response to the “otherness” of people. I’m disturbed by the idea that some people are more deserving than others by nature of who they are—and are not. By the idea that the labor of some people ought to accrue not to them, but to those who already have more than they need.
I’m disturbed, I guess, by the status quo of the world. I don’t accept the status quo of the world; so just in the course of living my life, I seem to be disturbing to it.
Do Not Disturb
I created a graphic called “Signs of Life” for a class I teach. One sign says “Do Not Disturb.” The other says “Wake Me Up.”
What does it mean to disturb something or someone? The word has a lot of negative connotations. It can mean to intrude or interrupt; to upset, agitate, or trouble; to bother; to perplex; to destroy order or composure; to provoke; or to cause a commotion. Some synonyms for disturb are hassle, pester, distress, distract, unsettle, perturb, and even derange.
Most people would not willingly seek out upset, agitation, distress, or even interruption. They would hang the “Do Not Disturb” sign on their door. But there’s an inescapable fact about disturbance that once grasped turns the concept on its head from something undesirable to something essential.
The ability to disturb and the ability to be disturbed enable vital life processes. They are literal signs of life and they allow us to live. Furthermore, without disturbance, change—especially transformational change—is literally impossible.
Everything everywhere is in motion all the time and everything is a process, which means disturbance is the natural order of things.
Neuroscientist Lisa Feldman Barrett says:
You tweak the world, and the world tweaks you back.
And then you tweak it again, and so it goes, on and on, back and forth between you and the world. We really can’t not tweak the world or be tweaked by it. We can’t plant seeds to grow food without disturbing the soil. Every interaction is a disturbance. Every creation is a disturbance. Every exchange is a disturbance. Music is a disturbance. Poetry is a disturbance. Social media is a disturbance. Art is a disturbance. A hike along Pino Trail in Elena Gallegos Open Space a few miles from my apartment is a series of disturbances.
I am a disturbance to the world. You are a disturbance to the world. Collectively we are a massive disturbance to the world.
There’s no choice involved in that. It’s a fact of life. But we can be intentional about what we want to disturb, how we want to disturb. We can ask and answer the question: what is the disturbance we want to be in the world?