Thoughts from a Thinking Girl

“Maybe you ought to keep going, find something else to write about. Not a lot of people will know what that is,” said my husband, in response to hearing the title I was proposing for this piece.

He might have been embarrassed that he didn’t remember this from his statistics class, but I’ve vowed not to try to dig for meanings under the surface. We’ll leave it that he was concerned I’d lose my readership with an obtuse title and idea.

“I only have three readers,” I replied. “I’ll risk it.” 

[And then I added the stuff in parentheses, in case he was right.]

▒

Here’s what I remember from Statistics class: (1) numbers mean anything you want them to mean, (2) statistics apply to groups of people, not individuals, and (3) for something to reach significance, it must happen so often (or so infrequently) that it is overwhelmingly likely that the thing you were examining was the cause. The forward push of science is to disprove the null hypothesis (remember this?) – the idea that your experiment or idea will have absolutely no impact on the thing you are studying. The tiny little change you make – adding sodium, changing the words of an anti-smoking campaign, seeking donations, figuring out how to get a politician deemed more likeable – will not make a difference. You hypothesize the absolute opposite of what you want to happen – that sodium makes the thing explode, that the wording works and not a single middle schooler in the land will begin smoking cigarettes, that money pours in for a good cause, that Politician A wins the seat. Off you go to test your idea, hoping against hope that you find something. And that the something you find is significant. It can’t help 10% of the time. It can’t help 50% of the time. It has to help 95% of the time or more. Because, p < .05 means that this outcome is likely to occur less than 5 times out of 100. If p < .005, you’ve got a real winner – less than 5 times out of 1000 – yes, 1000 trials – would this outcome occur without your intervention.

Research comprises a large part of most professions, whether we realize it or not. Even stay-at-home parenthood is ensconced in research – the unending study of what causes a youngster to eat vegetables, to go to sleep without complaint, to stop hitting a younger sibling, the magic combination of variables to ward off an oncoming tantrum.

We search for significance in our personal lives as well. We yearn to be significant, important, unique, or just plain known. It was hard enough to feel as if one’s life made much of a difference when acknowledging the presence of 6 billion people on the planet. The surge to 7 billion makes human anonymity and irrelevance the only supportable conclusion – insignificant bipeds swarming our subdivision anthills, condominium beehives, and freeway migrations. There is no way that we matter as much as we hope we do.

And yet, sometimes insignificance is exactly what I yearn for. The ability to feel small amidst the vastness of something greater. Not the vastness – or really, the sheer unimaginability – of 7 billion X 23 pairs of human chromosomes, yielding something like 322 billion chromosomal possibilities, give or take a few when the human-making machinery goes awry. But the vastness of the ocean, of skies so big we are dwarfed by clouds, winds so strong our eyes sting, rocks and pebbles and grains of sand, views that don’t end, only blur, greyish blue water meeting greyish blue sky. The moments where there are so few humans around that all that remains is the wonder of . . . depending on your philosophy or spirituality or pragmatism . . . the planet, the universe, Nature, Creation, Evolution, Big Bang Theory, and, for some, even, God.

For this year’s spring break, we headed to the cold, grey, blustery, rainy part of the Pacific Ocean. My most treasured moments were walking along the beach, seeing my son and his friend wading out into the ocean.
 

So much smaller at the ocean shore

 
They are layered and buffered against the bite of the wind, just about every inch of their bodies covered over in a fiber or material to keep out the feel of the natural world, so they are actually warm and dry despite walking into the ocean while rain intermittently mists and blows. As we walked along, the distance between us grew; I veered off to give them privacy and a sense of being there on their own, outside the purview of parental intrusion or protection. The green of my son’s windbreaker and the purple of my rain slicker let us keep one another in the periphery of our experience, allowing the clouds, wind gusts, bird calls, whooooshing of waves, and seashell debris to take center stage. In my vista, my son became so small, if I’d zoomed out any further he’d be no more identifiable than a mere shell of a foraged clam or mussel. These two boys, whose energy and ideas and combined life force are enough to fill two parental universes (or at least two households), a pair of tiny shorebirds, intently searching the sand and water for treasure.

My son and I share an inflated sense of importance. I matter to him, perhaps less so than when he was an infant, no doubt far more than I will as he heads toward adolescence. I might remain the most significant shaper of his life, as Mothers do, even when we are no longer in daily contact, no longer living under one roof. I’m under his skin, in his cells. This one creature belongs to me, and I to him. He has inherited 50% of my genetic material yet aligns those structures in ways that surpass and astound me, the worst of me looking so much better on him than it does on me, the best of me buried beneath what he’s already doing to enhance it and morph it into his own. And even though we know the arrows of genetics go only one way, I defy science to retain the null hypothesis that my son’s presence has not altered my own DNA, my brain and neural circuitry, the very material floating in the cells of my blood, bones and skin.

It’s my Mother who used to be the central human template from which all other versions of myself were generated, but now it is my son, the one creature whose presence on this planet forever changed my world in a way none of the other 7 billion have approached. No social science research could have predicted that of all my activities, all my productive work, the thing of most significance to me is this one small person, his own probability of existence a miraculous p = .00000000014285714, far exceeding the cutoff for a statistically significant finding (if I’ve done the math right, 1 divided by 7 billion, but even if I’m wrong, the number will mean what I need it to mean, as all statistics do).

I search for treasure all the time – shells, cloud formations, birds I can hear but who remain hidden, the look on my son’s face as he contemplates the idea that he is standing at the edge of the continent. Surrounded by endless water and sky, my son and I are both nothing and everything, we have no real meaning and yet remain profoundly filled with purpose. I found all I needed when I glimpsed that bright green coat, a tiny pixel dot in a scene that is still taking place long after we left the ocean shore, hiked back over the dunes, got in our car and returned to the population base.