Disruptive

Here’s me in my round specs, standing behind a bike stand shaped like round specs, contemplating a poster intended to make bicycle-riding-while-wearing-glasses look edgy, daring, and macho. I have spent my long life as an adult being drawn to artists, misfits, queer people, activists, people on the margins of society, and odd lots. It’s where I feel comfortable. None of us look edgy and daring (though many of us are), and none of us look very macho, though some of us do ride bicycles and almost all of us wear glasses. What is this trend in society toward looking tough, I wonder. Why do marketing people think that “Disruptive” people look like those guys on bikes? 

Disruptive people look like me. We disruptive people are often restless and unsuited to predictable, repetitive jobs and commitments. We like our own lives to be disrupted from time to time. We travel. We explore cultures and places unfamiliar to us. We like surprises. We often seek disruptions of one kind or another, so that we don’t get stuck in ruts. We love fiercely and loyally, and we make rich friendships, but we do keep moving through life, driven by curiosity to explore what is yet unknown.

Here is a lovely paragraph written by the poet Mary Ruefle:

Samuel Johnson said, “It is certain that any wild wish or vain imagination never takes such firm possession of the mind, as when it is found empty and unoccupied.” He was speaking of melancholy, and how idleness and solitude feed it, undeniably and uncontrollably feed it. We all know this is true, and yet it is equally true that such a state will fund creativity; as artists we understand the vital necessity of wasting time, of loafing and doing nothing, and I was wondering what it is that causes the free and idle mind to go one way or the other--into obsessive melancholy or into creative fervor. What tips the scales, so to speak?” --in Madness, Rack, and Honey, 2012, p. 286.