Sure, I love the banter of a quick-witted exchange now and again, and I can usually hold my own in such cases, but I also feel a deep relief when in conversation with someone who shares my great respect for the mind-organizing pause. In fact, I’m often more eager to hear what a pauser will say, because I know they’re crafting a response to fit the situation, digging for layers, weighing options, and preparing to deliver thoughtfulness.

I want that. I crave the deep response mined from the earth of the silent pause.

“Certain cultures, such as that of the Inuit Alaskan Indian tribes, have embedded into their linguistic structure a pause. It is natural to simply wait. Think it out. Then speak.”
~ Gary Seigel, The Mouth Trap

Flickr photo: The Moment, by seanmcgrath.

Related reading: Multilingualism for HSPs, Pep Talk | Simply Wait

“You can’t get to be a charming eccentric in old age without being weird in youth.”
~ Stacie, Idiosyncratic Daydream

Pull up your striped socks, slip into your funkiest shoes, check your wild red hair in the mirror, and head out the door to spend the day making people gawk. Or … say what no one else seems willing to say, offer the solution that expands minds, notice the thing out of place that makes all the difference.

Whether we’re weird on the inside or the outside, or both, those of us who are unusually sensitive can help make sensitivity and uniqueness more normal. That’s a paradox, I know.

As an aged eccentric in training, as a rebel with a cause, think of yourself as being on a mission. What’s your mandate? To strut your stuff, to desensitize our culture to sensitivity. Another paradox. How lovely.

Imagine the scope of glorious weirdness expanding to include everyone. What a wonderful world that would be.

“Allah loves wondrous variety.”
~ Azeem, Robin Hood – Prince of Thieves

Flickr photo: Free Girl in Colorful Polkadots, by D Sharon Pruitt / Pink Sherbet Photography

Related reading: The Power of Community, Differentiation and Intimacy

“Dave Hickey’s prose transports are like an eye attached to a butterfly attached to a rocketship…”

~ Lawrence Weschler

Dave Hickey’s résumé is impressive. He’s written for Harper’s Magazine, Rolling Stone, and Artforum, plus many other publications. He’s been the Executive Editor of Art in America magazine. He’s owned and directed an art gallery. He’s written and performed rock songs. I could go on (and on), but I won’t, because my point doesn’t have to do with Hickey’s former or current job titles. The single salient point, the riveting thing, is Hickey’s ability to think in a way that’s both deep and sideways, and to write about his thoughts with gripping flair.

Hickey’s Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy is a compilation of essays about artistic culture, with a large dose of memoir. But this is memoir of a unique order, simultaneously cool (as in neat-o), warm (as in open and vulnerable), and intellectual. The topics covered in Hickey’s essays range from Cézanne, and Flaubert, through jazz, Andy Warhol, Norman Rockwell, and the Rolling Stones, all the way to Perry Mason, Siegfried and Roy, and Liberace, with oodles more in between. And all the while, the last sentence read begs to be reread in order to dally a while longer in the company of Hickey’s language and large heart.

From the book’s introductory essay:

“We need so many love songs because the imperative rituals of flirtation, courtship, and mate selection that are required to guarantee the perpetuation of the species and the maintenance of social order – that are hardwired in mammals and socially proscribed in traditional cultures – are up for grabs in mercantile democracies. These things need to be done, but we don’t know how to do them, and, being free citizens, we won’t be told how to do them. Out of necessity, we create the institution of love songs. We saturate our society with a burgeoning, ever-changing proliferation of romantic options, a cornucopia of choices, a panoply of occasions through which these imperative functions may be facilitated. It is a market, of course, a job and a business, but it is also a critical instrumentality in civil society. We cannot do without it. Because it’s hard to find someone you love, who loves you – but you can begin, at least, by finding someone who loves your love song. And that, I realized…is what I do: I write love songs for people who live in a democracy. Some of them follow.”

~ Dave Hickey, Air Guitar, “Unbreak My Heart, An Overture”