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Now one tends to think, after a few decades of life, that you’ve got a handle on the human condition. Being rather predictable critters, you can make some pretty basic assumptions, and usually, you’ll be right. I mean, if someone is hungry, and you put a plate of something particularly yummy before them, they’ll eat, right?

And then some human has to step out of the normal range of behavior and do something odd.

If you like the status quo, we can get sort of annoyed at these folks. If someone dresses up in their superman outfit when they go grocery shopping, we tend to think they’re a bit deviant. Maybe loopy. Or just starved for attention. Whatever it is, we’re usually not filled with abject admiration. You follow this line of reasoning and it seems like we’d prefer everyone to walk around in grey jumpsuits and speak the same language and not really do anything too extraordinary. Hey, at least in a world like that none of us would have self-esteem problems!

If you don’t like the status quo, these people are sort of like heroes – unafraid to fly in the face of convention. Even if they are doing something really wacky, we hold a little admiration for them.

Lately there have been no shortage of these unique examples of human nature, right here in my little corner of Wisconsin. First there was the ruby. Yes, a ruby, sitting next to a small rubber frog on the edge of the drive-up teller station at the local bank. Someone had left the frog there, and he seemed a little lonely, so just for an experiment I placed a ruby between his rubbery little paws.

Now, this is a bank, mind you, and people are thinking about money, so you’d expect that someone would scoop that ruby up. Probably hundreds of people go through that line each day, and the ruby was only a short reach from their window. Someone was bound to take it.

But for weeks, it remained. Then, last week, we drove up, and to our great delight, the ruby was still there – only now, it had another companion. A little red gummy bear. If that isn’t a triumph of human nature, I don’t know what is.

There was a similar situation when my good friend Ricki, out watching over her flock at recess, saw one of her young boys shivering in the cold. She went over to see if he was alright, and he smiled through chattering teeth.

“Yes, I’m cold,” he told her. “But I like it!”

Or take the oddity we saw while driving back home along the freeway in negative fifteen below temps (that’s Fahrenheit for all of my readers in other lands, who have sensibly changed over to a system that actually makes sense). It was perched right on the side of the road, smiling out at all who passed by – a miniature snowman, with pine branches for arms. Not the sort of thing someone takes the time to build along a highway with cars whizzing by at 70mph.

These are triumphs – roadside snowman builders, gummy-bear leavers, and children who are still capable of feeling cold as a marvelous sensation. These are the things that let us know that humans are truly remarkable animals, capable of genuine and beautiful magic.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 5th, 2007 at 5:21 pm and is filed under Quick Thoughts. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site. Your comments will be queued for moderation and posted as quickly as possible.