Be a Detective for Small Miracles
Why seeking out anti-complaints is more necessary than ever
Above: In 1972, President Nixon took a ride on the new public transit system that had just debuted in the Bay Area, calling it “just like NASA” and “an example for the nation.”
“This planet has - or rather had - a problem, which was this: most of the people living on it were unhappy for pretty much of the time. Many solutions were suggested for this problem, but most of these were largely concerned with the movement of small green pieces of paper, which was odd because on the whole it wasn't the small green pieces of paper that were unhappy. And then, one Thursday, nearly two thousand years after one man had been nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to people for a change, a girl sitting on her own in a small café in Rickmansworth suddenly realized what it was that had been going wrong all this time, and she finally knew how the world could be made a good and happy place. This time it was right, it would work, and no one would have to get nailed to anything.”
-Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy
Walking uphill to a BART station located distressingly far from my apartment I passed rows of houses that my generation may never be able to afford, their yards peppered with NIMBY signs opposing bike lanes and housing near BART because Berkeley never met a progressive cause it couldn’t find a way to be hypocritical about. All those yoga classes seemed to make our population really good at twisting ourselves into pretzels to make a selfish reluctance to share space with other humans seem like enlightenment about urban planning, I thought. The weather was confusingly hot for this time of year, proof that the climate crisis was coming for Berkeley, marine layer be damned, doomed, and eventually evaporated along with my hopes of owning a home here. BART itself was facing an existential crisis after a huge drop in ridership post COVID that it was looking like it would never recover from. It seemed certain that the Bay Area would never figure out public transit, BART destined to be remembered mainly as the site a horrific police shooting that sparked an overdue debate about police violence, its only silver lining was the subsequent Ryan Coogler film that catapulted the more-handsome-by-the-second Michael B Jordan to well-deserved fame. BART’s legacy as a transit system, however, could perhaps be best summed up by that ironic photo of Nixon riding it for the first time in 1972. While it was shiny and exemplary then, it would not keep pace with the rapidly growing metro area it was supposed to serve. Nixon’s impressed grin and confident claim that BART would be an example for the nation would age about as poorly as Nixon’s presidency and the BART system as a whole. I was shaken out of my musings on police violence, the absurdity of war on drugs, and failed public transit when I remembered that my Clipper card was out of money and adding more might be a pain in the ass and then…
Wait. Stop. Let me try that again.
I’d decided to walk to BART, a great decision since it gave me a bit of exercise and some quiet time to think. It was a surprisingly warm and sunny winter day and I was looking forward to meeting my friend Jennifer in San Francisco for a delightful afternoon catch up at the House of Shields, a charmingly old school bar which has been open since 1908. The last time I’d taken BART to the city to see friends I’d noticed that the trains were surprisingly empty, which meant I’d definitely have a place to sit and read my book about awe. When I realized I needed to add money to my clipper card, I remembered that the whole thing now could be done on the Clipper app on my phone. Without breaking stride, I pulled out the nifty distraction rectangle in my pocket and with a few taps added $20 from my checking account to my Clipper balance. Woah. This tiny act of adding fare on my phone felt like nothing less than a small miracle. Had you told thirteen year old me in 2003, that instead of topping up a paper transit card by inserting cash into vending machines that were picky about which bills they favored, I could do the whole thing on a portable computer as cell phone that had not yet been invented I would have shaken my head in disbelief. Yet here I was living out that awe-inspiring technological achievement in real time.
These are two valid ways to start an essay about walking to BART. In writing, as in life, what matters most is often what you choose to focus on. What either telling of this story must include is that on one sunny winter afternoon, partway up Delaware Street I had my Clipper Eureka moment, which is what inspired this essay.
After emitting a mini Owen Wilson “wow” about how far technology has come I was left to wonder something much bigger than this. Given the fact that we are surrounded by small miracles like this every second of every day of our lives, why is so hard for people, including and especially me, to feel sustained joy or gratitude about any of this? Why is our misery a continuously burning tire fire while happiness is but a flickering candle? As a Californian, I feel paranoid even using fire in an analogy after so many bad wildfire seasons, lest PG&E clumsily knock my candle metaphor over and burn down half the Sierras again— see there I go again!!
The best explanation I’ve heard for this infuriating tendency is that our brains are wired to keep us alive, not keep us happy. This famously documented negativity bias has clear benefits from an evolutionary standpoint. However, like so much of our neurological baggage, things that are functional for an opportunistic, nomadic omnivore like us run into some distressing hang ups in a world of Youtube, endless robo calls, Instagram, and the 24 hour news cycle.
Ever since this mini epiphany I’ve been reminding myself to look for more small miracles like this. I’ve been surprised to find that they’re truly everywhere. You’re probably looking at or touching one right now. Becoming a detective for small miracles has shown me how densely populated our world is with magic, awe, and wonder.
Let’s take a tour.
Food
There is no such thing as a wild lemon. Lemons are the chihuahuas of the fruit world, owing their entire existence to thousands of years of concerted human intervention in the name of perfecting their theoretical “lemonality.” We still don’t know exactly how or where lemons were domesticated, either. We only have two educated guesses. The first is that someone in India, Myanmar, or China crossed a bitter orange and a citron. The second is that that someone crossed a citron with a lime in Northwest India or Pakistan and then crossed this with a pomelo somewhere in the Middle East. Either way, the next time you enjoy a Tom Collins or a lemon bar, take a moment and think about how many people had to keep crossing different types of citrus with each other with the blind faith that the resulting fruit would have the right balance of sweetness to acidity, while slowly but surely decreasing the pith content and increasing the juice content.
Lemons don’t have a monopoly on this kind of botanical magic, either. It’s all over the grocery store and your kitchen right now. The common ancestor of broccoli, kale, cabbage, and Brussels sprouts is a form of wild cabbage called Brassica Oleracea. While it was hardy, evolved to tolerate the limestone and salt-rich soils of the cliff sides where it grew naturally, it wasn’t famously tasty. As with citrus fruits, turning this thick-leaved, scraggly plant into cannonballs of cabbage or verdant crowns of broccoli took thousands of years of domestication. Transforming a scraggly cabbage cousin so bitter it would make broccoli rabe taste like Girl Scout cookies into sweet, flowery broccoli is a crowning achievement of humanity in my humble opinion. We didn’t even stop there, though! Some maniacal Italian not only bred broccoli to have sweeter, mild florets, but spun it off into hauntingly symmetrical Romanesco, which looks like MC Escher were commissioned to design a vegetable.
Nutrition
Before it was fuel for FOMO on Instagram, traveling to Europe from North America was a scurvy-ridden nightmare. Scurvy is a horrific disease caused by vitamin C deficiency whose symptoms include bleeding gums, bone pain, and teeth falling out. On long distance sailing expeditions, it used to be assumed that up to 50% of the crew might die of scurvy. The conventional understanding is that citrus saved they day, hence the term “limey” for British sailors. This sweet & sour historical shorthand overlooks the fact that even delicious citrus goes bad at sea. The real scurvy breakthrough came when a British expedition discovered that sauerkraut spared sailors the horrors of that disease. Ingenious souls around the world from China to Korea to Germany had long ago discovered the magic of fermenting cabbage. What they didn’t know was that fermentation not only extends its shelf-life but also makes the vitamin C more easily accessible. It was cabbage that saved the day! Be thankful you’ve never had to worry about the ravages of scurvy when planning an international trip and then go for seconds of sauerkraut or kimchi.
Technology
After exhausting all of the shark content within arms reach, I was watching a truly delightfully put together mini documentary about tiger attacks on Youtube. This made me realize that tigers are legitimately awesome to learn about, arguably the Great White Sharks of the land, but I’ll save hyping them for another essay lest I digress into discussing a particularly deadly tigress. The tiger video ended up shining a glowing spotlight on the intersection of our public library system and technology. In this informative video, the creator had helpfully included his source material as onscreen citations. In short succession, I saw not one but two fascinating-looking books all about tiger attacks. These looked like the kind of engrossing nonfiction I’d been dreaming about. So I paused the episode, went to the timestamps in the video where the book titles were displayed and wrote them down. Then in a fresh tab on my laptop I pulled up Oakland Public Library’s Overdrive, where you can check out e-books and download them directly onto your Kindle. No more than one minute after learning about these nonfiction books, I had both of them in the palm of my hand. Human knowledge that used to take weeks or months of printing, shipping, and waiting was now mere seconds away. I had no excuse to complain about a lack of reading material. Now the only dilemma was which tiger book to attack first!
Help
I put off starting to see a therapist for approximately 15-20 years too long. One afternoon, in the joyous uncomplicated romp that was summer of 2020, staring out of my apartment window at wildfire smoke while listening to a podcast about the rising death toll of this COVID thing I began to wonder why everything terrified or frustrated me these days. That’s when I decided it was past time to take the plunge and find a therapist.
One of my mom’s best friends is a therapist and gave me a tip that I’m deeply grateful for: just search on Psychology Today. I was delighted to see that finding therapists practicing near me was not difficult at all. After sending half a dozen of them a pre-written paragraph about what I was looking for, I started to get responses quickly. Not only were a few of them interested, but they all were doing therapy over Zoom, and several offered to do a quick phone consult to feel out the match before diving in. After chatting with three I realized that one of them was delightfully warm but not a good fit, another came across as an indifferent aunt, and the third asked genuinely interesting questions and had a relevant area of expertise. A week after my search had started I’d committed to a therapist and started meeting with her a few weeks later. Something I’d been neglecting to attend to for over a decade turned out to be easier to do and more impactful than I ever imagined possible.
The Philosophical Duality of Bluetooth Speakers
Of all of the miraculous tech we interact with on a daily basis, I think bluetooth audio has to be the most awesome and frustrating of all of them. It also nicely encapsulates why small miracles are so hard to appreciate in practice.
Despite being a mind-blowing achievement up there with WiFi as something that my chimp brain can barely comprehend, I’m often frustrated by how wildly inconsistent and dysfunctional Bluetooth is. Many times, my turquoise Bose speaker struggles to pair with the phone I have it connect with literally every day, despite it being mere centimeters away. I can’t for the life of my figure out what makes it struggle to pair sometimes while it does so unprompted at other times. My speaker’s robo voice announcing “connected to Reilly Brock’s iPhone,” from the other room of an empty apartment has scared the shit out of me on more than one occasion. Worse still, my speaker seems to have an affinity for pairing with everything except the phone I’m asking it to.
This even began to affect my relationship with Alexis. We began to squabble about how promiscuous our Bluetooth speakers had become, often pairing with the other person’s phone unannounced, resulting in some hilarious moments of my podcast blasting over her dancing practice, or her dance playlist blasting over my methodical onion chopping. This chaotic and unpredictable mashing up of music and podcasts was untenable. To address this, we had to start a policy of bluetooth monogamy, instructing both of our speakers to forget the other person’s phone before pairing with ours so henceforth they would only mate with their designated cellphone. Having solved a problem that tech itself created, we could finally enjoy our respective listening habits without ruining the other person’s vibe.
This Bluetooth saga taught me two important lessons. The first is that technology is like an arrowhead, easy to slide in, very hard to pull out of your life. A device you happily lived without for decades can go from a fun new arrival to a huge hassle whose proper functioning profoundly impacts your mood in the blink of an eye.
The second is that we’re literally wired to complain. Venting, gossiping, and talking shit just feels great. Who hasn’t cursed out an unnecessarily introverted bluetooth speaker or malfunctioning WiFi router that picked a truly terrible time to shit the bed?
In light of “The Gospel According to Bluetooth,” I think it’s crystal clear that in a fast-paced, tech-obsessed world, we all have to actively fight off negativity. The alternative is to let grievance, resentment, and frustration slowly but surely eclipse the very real sources of joy that were always there and continue to proliferate in front of our eyes.
I don’t want to come across as falsely optimistic or Pollyannaish about the world we’re living in here. Yes, there are real, pressing problems everywhere you look. It’s not at all hard to find horrific, upsetting injustices all around the world. Even the bouncy lyrics of “All Star” by Smash Mouth have gone from glib pop rock to a prophetic omen about global warming in just 24 years:
It's a cool place and they say it gets colder
You're bundled up now, wait 'til you get older
But the meteor men beg to differ
Judging by the hole in the satellite picture
The ice we skate is getting pretty thin
The water's getting warm so you might as well swim
My world's on fire, how about yours?
However, I’d argue that if you truly care about said problems, especially climate change, you’ll be a much more effective agent of change if you’re grounded and joyful in your life. Negative emotions are good at spurring discussion and action but pretty terrible for maintaining motivation and mood.
So, for me, take a moment and think about all of the things that had to go right for you to read these words. You have time in your day to read for pleasure. You have an electronic device with the power and wifi connection necessary to display this blog. You are drawing breath and taking in this information. There are no Amur tigers stalking you. Ok, sure both books said they only live in remote parts of Russia, China, and India, but it wouldn’t hurt to look up and double check that last one just to be sure.
PS:
If you are looking for an engrossing book about tigers, the ones I got from the library were:
The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Valliant
No Beast So Fierce: The Terrifying True Story of the Champawat Tiger, the Deadliest Animal in History by Dane Huckelbridge
Of these, I found No Beast So Fierce to be much better written. Support your local library and check it out if you’re interested.
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I read this installment while enjoying a sour ale called Cowbells at a local hops farm and brewery filled with roaming chickens and polite dogs. It’s own kind of tiny joy.