Do What Won't Compute

by Sara Flitner

I could hear her voice become guarded as she tried to return the conversation to softer ground. “You get so sharp when I’m just trying to get a word in,” she said, but I could already feel myself tensing. “I wish you would hear what I’m actually saying,” I fired back, meaning to stand my ground. 

I was talking to my closest confidant, a friend who had kept my secrets for more than 40 years. I was tired after a long week, and so was she, and things were veering into unusual territory. I could feel myself tense up when she tried to coax me into agreeing with her. “I’m really trying to stay in the conversation, but you’re taking things out of context.” “I’m having a completely different experience here, and you just won’t have it.” We both wanted to talk. Neither one of us wanted to listen. “My lid is flipped,” she said, and said a short good-bye and hung up the phone. It took three days of silence before we finished our conversation, my friend and I, a woman with whom I can have a whole conversation with a raised eyebrow from across the room. 

There is science behind why relationships struggle or fall apart in the face of a big negative event or stress. The amygdala experiences increased activity, making everything feel dangerous or threatening. Danger makes us hypervigilant, so we add things like insomnia and inflammation, taking us further from things that feel good. Activity in the hippocampal regions decreases, affecting our memory and ability to learn and retain, often described as brain fog. It is as if the body is trying to make us stop everything we are trying to do to outrun our discomfort. Slowing down means feeling the pain, instead of lashing out, and this is difficult work. The most difficult. 

What happens to relationships when virtually everybody, everywhere experiences upheaval as we did during the pandemic’s job losses, business and school closures, and sheer number of casualties, a bit more than three times the U.S. military deaths resulting from World War II? Or, now, in the country’s incoherent identity crisis? 

Many of us live like a bunch of wounded animals, pretending not to be in any sort of trouble while we try to elbow our way out of our disappointments. The divide in our country is not new, as evidenced by the fact that each Presidential victory in the past 40 years hovered just over the 50% mark. A lot of people in our country seem to be hurting and don’t know how to slow down long enough to remember what it felt like before the amygdala hijack. Like my best friend and I, struggling to find our connection through that landscape of fatigue or fear, we are working against biology. In a state of hyperarousal, we fight. We shut down. We worry. And we blame. 

I came across a favorite poem, “The Mad Farmer Liberation Front,” written by Wendell Berry, introduced to me (ironically) by my friend many years back. “Every day do something that won’t compute,” he says. “Be joyful though you have considered all the facts.”  

This is not a light request, but hear me out. 

Don’t be so informed. I rebel by not watching national news. I’ve decided to take a sabbatical from the click-bait media and instead of giving my attention to stories of disaster in faraway places, I take action here, where I am familiar with neighbors and nonprofits who do work that helps. Maybe I write a note to someone whose job or life just got so much harder with the uncertainty coming from Washington DC. I say, “Thank you,” every time I can mean it. 

Make room for other opinions. I mostly fail at this one, but practice makes progress. I actively look for reasons why someone who believes different things has a point. While my own values are heavily grooved by now, I can find room to see others as humans with real lives, ones they cling to as I do, as my friend does, as you do. I begin to see that at the edges of our stories, there are lots of blended, similar hopes. This is truth as old and mundane as mud. Lots of remedies come from mud. 

My best friend and I got better. We healed up enough that we began to see things for what they were. Our understanding remained gray, but that was space enough for inclusion, not exclusion, for seeing blurred lines not as weakness but as life. 

This is not a call for excusing cruelty but to remember every lasting human story ends with someone willing to stand up for humanity, even at the cost of their own life. It’s also a chance to remember that the journey toward change begins with a single step, usually when the stepper realizes that her doing the same thing doesn’t work anymore. 

Do what won’t compute.