"Muchness"

Often my friends & family tease me about my time on the computer. For a person who’s favorite thing in the world is asking why, Google has become addictive. They say the secret to aging well is an active mind, so chances are good I’ll be here for a good long while. Any question that comes up leads me to new ideas and new information.

After watching the newest Alice in Wonderland movie, a friend shared an article with me about “muchness” – in short, finding a way to connect to the energy and person we were as a child. Whenever that discussion comes up, I immediately find myself looking down from my favorite branches over the valley I lived in, wondering through the jungle of my grandmother’s yard, or playing on the stretch of dirt in front of her house building dams and rivers to manage the rainwater as it came down the street. It reminds of three things: I was always alone, I was always outdoors, and I was always cataloguing and testing nature to see how it reacted.

Makes sense out of the reason I chose a field project for my PhD, why the greenhouse was my solace in school, and why my favorite companions these days are my dogs and my chickens. I like people, but to invest the energy of discovery in a person that I do in “dam building” is losing endeavor. Have you ever heard the hum of the tall grasses? All living things emit a constant sound.

There is a trick to interpreting Myers-Briggs results for the E/I (extrovert/introvert) preferences portion. Most people assume that the E refers to a love of people and crowds. But it does not. It is a measure of how you are stimulated – externally, by things happening around you; or internally, by mental or emotional self-processing. So, a person who loves to be outdoors, for instance, would rate higher on the E scale, although most of that might be quite solitary. The wind, smells, sounds, temperature, touch are all external stimuli. But their greatest effect would be lost if there were lots of other people around. Groups are very seldom, by their very nature, quiet or non-stimulating. However, the “ I” person may never even know whether they are outdoors or in, because the rich journey into their imagination may very easily exclude everything around them.