I recently spent a week in a rented apartment in Rhode Island. The place had the requisite smattering of nautical décor, but mostly the walls were decorated with encouraging, if contradictory, advice.
The dining room admonished, “The purpose of life is to be useful, to be responsible, to be compassionate. It is, above all, to matter, to count, to stand for something, to have made some difference.” But the mudroom advised you to “Take chances. Abandon all the rules. Ditch the recipe. Color outside the lines.” The kitchen gently scolded, “Never get so busy making a living that you forget to make a life.” Even the hand towel got in on the action, inviting us through turquoise embroidery to “Wash your worries away.”
I don’t actually disagree with any of these statements. Well, except the hand towel, whose message appears to encourage OCD and anyway, should read “dry your worries away” since it is, after all, a towel.
Still, they rub me the wrong way. I don’t go on vacation to be bossed around by a wall. Nor do I particularly want to deputize my décor as my life coach.
Plus, maybe it’s just me, but I rarely look at one of those things and say, “Oh, yeah, nailed it.” Instead, I start to wonder: Does my existence matter? Do I take enough chances? Have I made a good life? I don’t need to agonize about these things while getting a glass of water.
And even when they get it right, I don’t want to consider that my life philosophy has been drafted by a low-level corporate creative, then stamped onto a piece of pine by a machine in China and offered back to me for $50.
I am, however, possibly in the minority in this sentiment. Open a home catalogue and you’re likely to see quotes from Rilke and Rumi, Dickinson and Emerson. There are magnets advising you to “Live, Laugh, Love,” or to “Do what is right, not what is easy,” rocks emblazoned with “Fearless” or “Dream” or “Create.”
You can tell how important something is to a culture by counting the words used to describe it. The Nunavik Inuit dialect has over fifty words for snow, Sussex thirty words for mud. The English-speaking world must embrace generalized advice because there sure are a lot of terms for it. Proverb, adage, maxim, rule of thumb, axiom, saying, saw, epigram, apothegm, dictum, brocard, byword, shibboleth, gnome, bromide, platitude, aphorism—the list goes on.
There appears to be comfort in receiving wisdom in digestible quantities from authoritative strangers. Advice columnists have been telling us what to do for a hundred years or more. Girls from the 1600s to the Victorian era cross-stitched morally improving sentiments into muslin, then hung them in bedrooms and parlors all over the English-speaking world. In the 1730s, Benjamin Franklin began making good money off an almanac that combined weather and other predictions with admonitions like “Make haste slowly,” and “Speak little, do much.” Shakespeare’s Polonius sent his son off to school with enough warnings to create a raft of proverbs we still quote. Aesop punctuated his tales with morals. Even the ancient Sumerians had a tradition of so-called “wisdom literature,” which passed on tips like “You should not vouch for someone; that man will have a hold on you,” and “You should not boast; then your words will be trusted.”
If I’m being honest, aphorisms have helped me, too.
When I was in elementary school and struggling, my family went to Sun Valley, Idaho to look for a horse. I still remember the interiors of the boutiques, brightly targeted at the kind of money that wouldn’t reach my part of Montana for another couple of decades. High on one wall hung a T-shirt with a colored zebra standing apart from its monochromatic herd, hooves resting on the slogan, “Dare to be different.”
I was transfixed. A leftist, atheistic kid in a sea of religious conservatives, I’d grown used to the way my stomach bottomed out when heads turned toward me, used to the violence of a sidelong glance. For reading too much, wearing weird, unstylish clothes, liking the wrong things and not believing in the right ones, I was taunted, exiled, told daily I was going to hell.
Others fared worse: Crow and Shoshones, kids from the south side, anyone non-cis. The city, mostly white, mostly straight, punished difference. Standing out from the crowd invited brutal correction.
But here was a T-shirt proving that someone somewhere thought it was okay to be unusual. Not just okay; admirable. Thought it strongly enough to illustrate the idea and print it on clothing. To sell it in a fancy store.
It felt like your teacher telling you that “F” was really an “A.” Like a nod of approval from the parent who never smiles. Like the first unlocked door in a maze of dead ends. It felt like hope.
It didn’t matter that the T-shirt was mass-produced. In fact, its very anonymity invested it with authority. Just look at health information prefaced with, “studies show…” or advice starting, “they say that….” For all our purported free thinking, most Americans still love to defer to experts, and nothing confers expertise like a lack of attribution.
Back home, I asked my artist sister to draw a version of the zebra for me. I held onto that picture all through high school and into college. I didn’t let go of it until I no longer needed someone else’s words to justify what I couldn’t help to be.
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