Brave New Kitty

Sometimes, the biggest obstacle to growth is my own attitude. I had this driven home recently over something so simple I can hardly believe it: making hard-boiled eggs.

I had been making hard-boiled eggs the same way for years; all my life, really, just as I’d watched my mother do it. Stick them in water, bring to a boil, and let them cook until there’s no way they couldn’t be done; at least half an hour to be on the safe side. These eggs always had a strong sulfur odor, and the yolks were always circled with an unsightly green tinge. But I had never thought twice about it. This was how I’d always made hard-boiled eggs, and this was just the way hard-boiled eggs were.

Well, Jim said that was wrong. He said the green tinge and the sulfur smell weren’t necessary, that made a different way, hard-boiled eggs had nice yellow yolks and no overpowering stench. The few times I made hard-boiled eggs for him, he didn’t eat them. I thought he was just being picky, that these traits were an inevitability of the hard-boiling process and that there really was no way to make them the way Jim wanted them. I chalked it up to a difference of opinion (mine being the right one, of course), and we went for years without having hard-boiled eggs in the house.

Turns out I was wrong.

A few months ago, Jim and I were watching a cooking show and lo and behold, a chef showed his technique for making perfect hard-boiled eggs. He described what causes the green yolk and the sulfur smell (they’re related, and what do you know, are the effects of overcooking), and how to eliminate that. Jim went right to the kitchen and made a batch, and they turned out just as the chef said they would: no green yolk and no strong smell. He ate them all up, and asked me to make more for him. (Jim loves hard-boiled eggs.) I tried, but half-heartedly, so some turned out and some didn’t. This was due to my unwillingness to use a proper ice bath to stop the cooking process, which the chef said was essential.

I was annoyed about the whole thing, I’m not sure why, but I didn’t try to make hard-boiled eggs again until this week. Jim had been asking for them, so I decided to give it another try, this time with the right attitude and willingness to do it properly. I found a method on the Internet and followed it exactly, right down to the ice bath. This time, the eggs turned out beautifully–cooked to perfection, with no green yolks, no strong smell, tender whites; perfect in every way.

As silly as this might sound, I got a real sense of accomplishment from learning how to properly hard-boil those eggs. I think this was because I overcame a real blind spot about it, an unwillingness to even consider that there might be a different way to go about it. It was a small thing, but it really made me think about how my own attitude is sometimes the biggest obstacle to learning and growing. I realized that my default stance is often one of closed-mindedness, and this is something I will have to constantly challenge in myself if I want to change it, which I most definitely do. I need to learn how to learn.

This was kind of an unpleasant awareness to have about myself. Making eggs is a small thing, not a big threat to my ego, and so a good window into the awareness. But what other things must I be closed-minded about, and equally closed-minded about seeing the closed-mindedness?

I’m sure there are a lot.

I’m not going to drive myself crazy trying to ferret them all out. That’s a lifelong process, and all I can do is engage with it to the best of my ability. But being honest with myself about my lack of willingness to do so, and making an effort to recognize that lack of willingness in as many of its manifestations as I can, should certainly be beneficial to my overall attitude and ability to keep learning.

Do you remember Hogan’s Heroes, the 1970s sitcom about a German POW camp? The “prisoners” were actually Allied spies, and the Germans were depicted as nincompoops. The prison guard was a fat, stupid man named Sergeant Schultz. When Hogan would start pumping him for information, Schultz would say, in his heavy German accent, “I know noth-ING!” Hogan would wave a Hershey bar under his nose, and Schultz would always capitulate. The Sergeant Schultz Principle is something I learned in AA meetings. It’s a humorous way of saying that I know I still have a lot to learn.

An interesting thing happens when you embark on a journey of self-discovery. The more you learn, the more you realize you have to learn. Another way of saying this is, “The more I know, the more I know I don’t know.” I love this! It fits so perfectly. It’s exactly what it was like for me in early sobriety, when self-discovery was new and fresh, and the possibilities were so exciting that they literally took my breath away at times. When the learning is happening at such a pace that you can’t keep up, and you can see alternate paths and forks in the road and fascinating asides, and you become curious about how those who went before you did it, and you make connections between things you’ve been looking at all your life, and you realize there is more to the world and to yourself than you ever could have imagined, well, that is a very good place to be. In that state, the very assimilation of knowledge is a humbling experience!

“Humility” may have a bad connotation for you. If so, this is something you must get over, because humility is an essential quality for personal growth. Humility is not humiliation, that is, public embarrassment. To be humble is to be modest. It is the opposite of arrogance. It does not mean that you are insincerely modest; it means you acknowledge your strengths and your weaknesses realistically. Some definitions of humility that I like are: “feet firmly planted,” (from its Latin root humus, meaning soil), “remaining teachable,” and “not thinking less of yourself, but thinking of yourself less.”

The “I know nothing” principle is empowering. The need to be right vanishes. You are free to be curious about everything. You can cheerfully admit when you don’t understand something. You don’t have to be embarrassed by being wrong.

“I know nothing” is a hyperbolic expression of the principle of humility. Of course you know something. In fact, if you are wise enough to be aware of how little you know, you know a lot. But more importantly, you have the right attitude for lifelong learning.

Hogan and Schultz