From Ted Klontz
I went to a nursery school the other day with a friend to pick up her two-year old. As we approached the classroom, I noticed the lights were out. Looking in the window I could tell it was ‘quiet time’. All the little ones were lying down on tiny mats, which were strategically placed around the room so as to provide enough distance so they couldn’t see each other and thus be able to rest.
I was sort of surprised when my friend opened the door, walked in and greeted her son. Within minutes all the kids were up; talking, chatting, and moving around the room. I was thinking that the children must not have wanted to be left out of the action. They were coming up to the various adults in the room with innumerable requests to ‘have’ this, or ‘show’ that.
In that moment, the noise level from the kid’s behaviors of “look at me” and “notice me” reminded me of when, as a youngster, one of my jobs was to sleep with the chickens during the Greene County Fair. My grandfather was the head of the poultry department and for the 6-day run of the fair one of my duties was to feed and water, what seemed to be a hundred chickens, twice a day. The other duty was to try to sleep in the chicken barn, right amongst them, once the fair closed down for the night to make sure no one broke in and created any chaos.
As I remember it, the chickens would finally get quiet shortly after the carnival rides finally closed down for the evening, which was at 1:00AM or so. I would crawl onto my cot, and try to go to sleep. It never failed that about 4:00AM there would always be one rooster that would start the day off by letting loose one long loud crow. Hoping against hope, I would lie there and pray that the other chickens wouldn’t follow suit, but it never happened. Within 10 minutes every chicken in the place was doing their ‘chicken thing’, so I would get up and begin watering and feeding them all the while wishing for more sleep. Because once awake, there was no getting them to go quiet again.
What do these two stories have to do with anything? During these interesting economic times I have been frequently asked for my opinion on how things got to be this way. So many people, doing so many self-destructive and self-defeating things financially. What I have concluded is that the worse thing that we as human beings can imagine is to be left out. So, if it seems that a number of our friends are doing something (buying a ‘hot’ stock, flipping houses, buying things they can’t afford with credit cards, etc.) and it seems to be working for them, like the little kids and the chickens we want to be a part of the ‘flock’, desperately not wanting to be forgotten.
40,000 years ago being banned, shunned or forgotten by the group would have meant certain death. The more stress we experience (i.e. stress about not belonging or having a place to belong) the more this primitive part of our brain still operates as if this is true and dominates our thinking and our choices.
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