THE MAN, THE BOY AND WHEN A BANANA IS JUST A BANANA

Many, many people dream about a perfect world where there is an explanation for everything and nothing happens without an obvious reason. People don’t like uncertainty.

We are content if we understand how and why something is the way it is or how and why it happened, even if it isn’t nice. If we don’t, or heaven forbid can’t, explain or understand something, we have a problem.

There are two standard human responses to the unknowable and inexplicable:

• to pretend it doesn’t exist (which is quite common in the scientific community where anything that can’t be observed or measured doesn’t exist by definition); or

• to invent an explanation or reason (whether it corresponds to reality is not really an issue, as long as there is an explanation and a reason).

Just how silly this is, is well illustrated by the following stories:

A man goes to the doctor …

A man goes to the doctor distraught beyond words because he has a major and most embarrassing problem. After examining him the doctor prescribes medication for the man’s condition and a mood enhancer and instructs him to be back in a week. When the man returns the following week the doctor is delighted to find him in a much better mood, smiling and joking with the receptionist and other patients.

Doctor:

I am so glad to see that you are feeling better. The tablets must have worked.

Man:

Not a chance. It’s much worse than last week.

Doctor:

But then you were ready to jump out of the window and now, even though it’s worse, you’re on top of the world. How come?

Man:

It’s those little blue happy tablets you gave me Doc. Ever since I’ve been taking them … well … it doesn’t matter.

Berry patient

A doctor has spent the better part of an afternoon patiently plucking tiny berries from a little boy’s left ear.

Exasperated Doctor:

Just tell me why. Why on earth did you stuff all these berries in your ear?

Smiling Boy:

They kept falling out when I stuck them up my nose!

Sigmund Freud may have got some stuff wrong but he understood the sometimes random nature of life as this often-told story shows: While they were studying the meaning of dreams (and focusing on bananas as phallic symbols in dreams) the great Doctor came down to breakfast one morning to find his daughter (who was also his research assistant) extremely troubled:

Freud:

What is it?

Daughter:

You know how our research shows that when we are dreaming about bananas we are actually dreaming about penises?

Freud:

Correct.

Daughter:

Well, last night I had a dream about all the men in the city including you. Every one of them, including you, had a banana and yours, yours was much bigger than anybody else’s. Whatever could that mean?

(After a short moment of thought)

Freud:

Well daughter … sometimes, just sometimes … a banana is just a banana.

 

It may have been nice to have an explanation for everything. We don’t.

Living in an uncertain world is a given. All of us (you, me and everyone else) were signed up for the adventure at birth – and there are no emergency exits along the way.

Just like the intrepid explorers of old, we are hacking our way through our own jungles without a clue of what we might encounter next.

We can pretend we aren’t and take little happy blue pills that make us feel better without our being better; we can keep ourselves busy with nonsense; or we can buckle-up, enjoy the roller-coaster ride and make it up as we go along.

Which sounds like more fun?

Insist on joy in spite of everything!

Swim easy in the deep!