Good & Bad of Western Stoicism
There is much I appreciate about the place and culture of this area. As I’ve mentioned before, this land and the customs and traditions that stay strong here are comforting elements to reclaim as my own. And having lived and traveled elsewhere, I also know there are other parts of the world that hold attraction for different reasons, and are held in equally high regard by the people who call that place home. Such is the nature of our earliest imprinting, I suppose.
Through all my travels, however, I’ve come to realize the people that settled in this area—as well as those already here beforehand—that carved a life out of, and into, this wind-swept range of grassy dunes, are a very unique bunch. You can take that however it suits you, but I mean no disrespect. On the contrary, I have a lot of admiration for the sheer grit and gusto ingrained in the characters populating our fine corner of creation.
Stoic by nature—or maybe just habit—folks around here lean hard into the understated way of handling things. A guy who gets his spine snapped in three places getting bucked off a horse will likely have no more to say on the subject than he’s “out of commission for a bit.” And that’s all well and good. If you’re from here, you know how to read those statements for what they’re truly worth. I have no beef with this doctrine of downplay, it’s just that the downstream effects can make communication a challenge at times.
I have never been someone who enjoys small talk; I can actually get quite comfortable in a long silence that someone else might feel the need to fill with a detailed commentary on the weather, or some other similarly benign subject matter. Such prattle commonly passes for pleasantry; this is how we greet one another in these parts. Perhaps I’m just not pleasant. There is precious little I find more taxing than being trapped in a conversation that dances around the periphery of anything close to substance, skirting raw truths in lieu of superficial whatnots and who-saids. This type of banter not ony feels like a waste of time to me, but the bigger problem is it builds up a very effective (intentional?)barrier to truly getting to know anyone. This isn’t such an issue for the locals who knew your granddaddy and his grandpappy before him, and which “old place” they inhabited before they moved to somebody else’s “old place.” But for anyone new to the area, or re-acclimating after a 40 year absence (Uh-hem) it can be difficult to break through all that empty pleasantness to the real person beneath.
And I realize deeper subjects are just not always fit for casual conversation. They serve no practical purpose, and they are especially unwieldy (unwanted) in the stoicism sphere.
People get particularly squirmy when you talk openly about matters of the heart, even though I imagine all of us, in the end, when the clock has run out, will speak of nothing else. Somehow though, the thin illusion of immortality that often veils our everyday exchanges makes getting to the weighty point of what truly matters too much work, or too risky; no one likes to be vulnerable—especially these stalwart, stoic Westerners.
Ahh well…despite this small draw-back, there still remains a multitude of blessings in which I take solid comfort—watching piled-high clouds gallop across an endlessly blue sky; the luminous colors of a sunset melting into the distant horizon; that oh-so-soothing shushing sound of the wind filling the cottonwoods. The deep-running roots that give us such a strong sense of community here—still. The indelible nature of such blessings that are a common backdrop to our lives here, reminds me that not everything needs to be put into words in order to be known, or made real—or even shared.
Sometimes it can be better not to say anything at all.
