What is it that attracts us with such power? For many years I was searching for an answer to this question. What is the desire that draws us away from common sense? Gradually, the answer dawned on me: It is our longing to belong. But does not this deep desire in the human heart aim precisely at that all-embracing communion from which common sense springs? Isn’t our homesickness a desire for the cosmic household of which common sense is the family spirit? Indeed it is.
But we fail to go all the way.We settle too soon, settle for less, before we reach our true home.
This is true for every addiction. Our goal is something good that attracts us. The higher the good, the stronger the attraction. The stronger also the addiction if we do not go on until we reach the goal, but halfway there settle for less and cling to that. Thus, one may seek for some high value — contentment, peace of mind, fellowship — find a little bit of it in the bar at the corner, and get no further than a drunken binge and a hangover. Likewise, we may find our longing to belong partly satisfied by a community that falls far short of being all- embracing, cling to this partial fulfillment of our desire, and end up with a common narrow-mindedness that is anything but common sense. “Ra! Ra! Ra! My country — or my university, my union, my church — right or wrong!”
Let’s not be too hard on ourselves. Settling for less is a perennial temptation, and so is its opposite: restless exploring. In each of us there is the settler and the explorer. Both are driven by fear. The settler fears change; the explorer fears boredom. In our explorer mode, we are so enamored with the seeking that we fear nothing so much as finding, for this would bring the search for our heart’s desire to an end. In our settler mode, in contrast, we are so eager to find that we cut the search short.
But we are all pilgrims. In the pilgrim, explorer and settler are united. Pilgrims have a double courage: the explorers’ courage to go beyond the familiar and the settlers’ courage to be content with it. On a pilgrimage, each step is the goal, yet each goal may turn out to be just a step on the road that leads on — we must not cling to it.
Clinging is our problem as pilgrims through life. And clinging springs from fear. It is basically a healthy reflex. Newborn babies, when frightened, reach up with arms and legs in an effort to cling to their mothers — an instinct that may go back to an age when our mothers were still leaping from branch to branch and we’d better hang on when danger threatened. We retain this instinct for our entire lives.When fear takes hold of us, we grasp and cling, mentally no less than bodily. What is new always seems threatening at first. If we want to grow, expand, and go forward into new territory, we must learn to let go of the old.
No goat can butt alone.
— SWISS
A single bracelet doesn’t jingle.
— FULFULDE
One key doesn’t rattle.
— CHINESE
One somebody can’t quarrel.
— AFRICAN AMERICAN
For most of us, the communion we have with our mothers before we are born is perfect. Yet we must let go of it and be on our own before we can find communion on a new level. Whenever we move forward to a new and wider community, it is like another birth — often not less difficult and painful. What is so frightening is that we must step out, speak up, and go it alone. To push beyond the mental horizon of those with whom we felt at home and to push on towards ever wider horizons takes great courage. Fear is the great obstacle to us— fear of losing our friends, of being ridiculed, of being ostracized, of standing alone. Unless we can overcome our fear, we will cling to what is at hand and get addicted to it. In every society the pressure to conform is powerful. Many of us are cowards when it comes to going it alone.
Imagine a twelve-step program for Cowards Anonymous, meetings in which members would support one another in standing up fearlessly for common sense. Instead, we are more like the citizens in Hans Christian Andersen’s story “The Emperor’s New Suit.” All it took was two swindlers who claimed to weave garments for the king that would be invisible
Marriage is a covered dish.
— SWISS
Before you marry, keep your two eyes open; after you marry, shut one.
— AFRICAN AMERICAN
If you wish to be blamed, marry; if you wish to be praised, die.
— GALLA
to anyone unfit for office or stupid beyond words.Who would admit to this? From the emperor on down, everyone claimed to see what wasn’t there and admired the beautiful clothes. One supported the other, as the whole population silently conspired to maintain the lie, and the emperor in his make-believe new suit paraded down the street stark naked. “But he has nothing on at all!” a little child called out at last, breaking the spell. “Children and fools speak the truth,” a proverb declares. Why shouldn’t they? They have nothing invested in the status quo. Unless we “become like little children” (Matthew 18:3), we will find the obstacles to common sense insurmountable. Only common sense can make you free.
One without a friend is like the right hand without the left.
— BOSNIAN
When friends are together, even water is sweet.
— CHINESE
Hold a true friend with both hands.
— NIGERIAN
Cultivating Common Sense
Think of your favorite piece of music. Remember what it feels like when you hear that piece. Something deep within you starts resonating. Maybe there comes a moment when it becomes “music heard so deeply that it isn’t heard at all, but you are the music while the music lasts” (as T. S. Eliot put it in The Four Quartets). Here you are attuning yourself to music through your sense of hearing; through common sense, you can attune yourself in a similar way to the harmony of the cosmos. Common sense is a sense — just like hearing, tasting, or smelling — and we can cultivate it just as we cultivate our other senses. There are people who have so refined their sense of taste that they can tell in what soil the grapes for a certain wine were grown. Through that sense we call “common,” you can “taste”—in everything you experience — the soil in which all of us are rooted. Every child is born with this sense. It is our birthright as humans.We need only cultivate it.
Cultivating common sense is a lifelong task. Here I will point out three aspects of the task: attuning ourselves to nature, developing a support system, and learning to question authority. But to cultivate common sense is not only a task— it is a lifelong joy. Nothing gives you more joy than when your heart grows wider and wider and your sense of belonging to the universe grows deeper and deeper. It is a healing process. Anyone can tell that our society must be sick by looking at what we are doing to nature: We make nature sick. That’s the bad news. The good news is that we can tap into the living spring of still healthy nature and so heal ourselves and society again. By failing to use common sense, we humans have become cosmic outlaws. Our most urgent task is to recover our kinship with nature.
To expose ourselves to nature, it is not necessary to travel to the Grand Canyon or to some Pacific island. What we must change is not our geographic location but our inner attitude. With dulled hearts, we will merely bring noise and pollution to the most pristine environment; yet to alert inner eyes, trees in a pitiful city park or merely the weeds on the empty lots of slums can speak of patience, tenacity, and much that goes beyond words. Sparrows will come to you almost anywhere if you throw them a few breadcrumbs; if you open your heart to these little gray and brown sisters and brothers, they will tell you that you are not alone. Even the caged animals in a zoo, painful as it is to encounter them there, will speak to us if we learn to listen.