The Death of Whimsy

In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. Yet God gives his creatures remarkable freedom: watch a bird fly from branch to branch to sing its song, or squirrels chase each other around a tree, or a child exploring a newfound cardboard box. These aren’t robots doing precisely what they were programmed to do. All too often, however, humans prefer to exercise chance-eliminating modes of control, trying to remove the unexpected for the sake of “better living.” This is the death of whimsy.

Whimsy punctuates the rhythms of life, bringing lightness, joy, and surprise to our experiences. Whimsical ideas voiced by friends or family turn our minds in new directions and help us see the world in new and unexpected ways. Whimsical fairy tales upend or subvert typical expectations to create unexpected possibilities that convey the world’s magic. C.S. Lewis wrote that a fairy tale can unleash the true potency of the reality we inhabit yet whose marvels we so often fail to see. A whimsical attitude seeks new ideas and maintains an openness to disruption, chance, and the unexpected because it knows that these encounters are what stretch us, grow us, and help us see the world as more than just a machine aligned to maximize efficiency and production.

The whimsy-killing impulse manifests in many fields, including those that host America’s pastime. As the college baseball playoffs began the slow march of whittling the original 64 teams down to 16, and then down to the 8 who would go to the College World Series in Omaha, Nebraska, commentators floated the idea of re-ranking the remaining teams after each round. Supporters believe that achieving the most “correct” outcome in the playoffs is the ultimate goal. Re-seeding every round would ensure that the “best” remaining team always plays the “worst” remaining team. I shuddered at the suggestion. Don’t we like the underdog story? The Cinderella run to a championship? The reminder that a team with a little grit, a little character, a little skill, and, yes, a little luck, can slay Goliath? Why would we want to reduce the chance of seeing this sort of run? Because we like fair outcomes. We like merited outcomes. We like predictability and believing that we can earn our way to our destination.

The more I considered the baseball tournament proposal, the more I saw society working to undermine the unexpectedness brought about by whimsy. Look at friendships and dating in today’s optimized world. More and more, friendships are kindled, developed, and curated within the tight confines of online affinity groups. We defend our positions in a Facebook group to people who already agree with us; there is no chance that the guy drinking a beer three stools down will jump in with a differing opinion. Perhaps even worse, online dating practically begs people to narrow their pool of potential partners. Why strike up a conversation with someone in the park, or at the bar, when you can let the algorithm (and some fortuitous swiping) set you up with the “perfectly compatible” (or perfectly curated) match? Our belief is that we know ourselves and thus are best served by narrowing our dating pool to match that self-knowledge. But is that true? Or do the chance encounters in life teach us that we need a robust community to help shape us into our final form?

We see this same societal urge to curate in the explosion of youth travel sports. Why risk putting your eight-year-old in your city’s rec league? You might not know the coach you get. You might not know many (or any!) kids on the team. Your son or daughter might not play the position you think he or she is destined to play professionally. We no longer countenance the whimsy of encountering new, unexpected, and interesting people, or adverse circumstances that help us grow and mature. Instead, we curate our children’s youth sports experience in the name of better competition and more opportunity. But what opportunities do we throw away by controlling all aspects of our kid’s sports lives?

Again, we see the urge to kill whimsy in our quest to control our living environments. How many people do you know who wear a Fitbit or other health tracker? These devices clearly have real benefits. But for some people, tracking macros is more en vogue than feasting with friends. I have been the guy who brings food with him to a dinner party because “I’m not eating carbs right now.” In our quest to care for our bodies, do we limit our experience of the real and good life that God has set before us?

What happens when our entire lives become curated? The effort to kill whimsy rests on three lies about the world that we should fight against. The first lie says that a place is given to us, not us to a place. In one of Wendell Berry’s Sabbath Poems (1999, IV), he says “A tree forms itself in answer / to its place and the light.” In another (2000, V), he reminds us of “the health of self forgetfulness.” When we kill whimsy by trying to control our place, our relationships, and our lived spaces, we declare that we are god. But any sane evaluation of life clearly reveals that this is not the case. We, like Jayber Crow or Burley Coulter, are members of a place and community that existed before us and will continue after us. It is a community that will bring us face to face with unexpected people, challenges, and joys. It is a community that forms us, and that in turn we help form.

Second, the death of whimsy preaches to us that we control outcomes, not God. When we manipulate our lives to remove chance outcomes and encounters; when we become relentless optimizers on a quest to remove any inefficiency from life, we deceive ourselves into believing that we control our lives. And we struggle to cope when the unexpected and undesired inevitably crops up anyway. We would do well to regularly remember that we are not in control. One way to do this is to live a whimsical life that invites the serendipitous. Inviting unpredictability will grow us into well-rounded citizens by exposing us to people, circumstances, and situations that we otherwise would have “optimized out” of our life.

Third, the death of whimsy declares that efficiency and optimization is the highest good. In college baseball, re-seeding teams is an attempt to find a more efficient way to crown the best team. Curation of our social life (actively or passively algorithmic) is an attempt to eliminate people different from us and create a “better” friend group. Optimization of our food intake aims to extend our lifespan as much as possible. The Scriptures make clear that God works through the weak, not the optimized.

I finished watching the Murray State Racers defeat Ole Miss to advance in the NCAA baseball tournament and then watched them beat Duke to advance to the College World Series. The tournament was more enjoyable because of the Racers’ unexpected run. Then I thought of the joy that a life open to the unexpected brings. There is the unexpected opportunity to watch your daughter enthralled with bubbles because you decided to stay home instead of getting in one more sports lesson. There is the joy of the conversation about Plato’s Republic with the bartender at your favorite local watering hole because you decided to do the inconvenient work of showing up to have a discussion in person instead of through an online discussion group. And there is the deepening love of friendship that develops over spontaneous meals and shared grief, of long conversations that meander to unimagined places. Let whimsy back into your life. When you do, you may find that joy comes along with it.