“Where did you prep?”
I was walking to some orientation event in my first week of university. I was with a new acquaintance I had met on the soccer field earlier that day. I can’t recall his name or anything other than that odd question. I hadn’t even started classes and I was already hit with questions I didn’t understand. “Prep” for what? I had showered. My shirt was clean. What was I missing?
Turns out the question was about what elite prep school had I come from. Definitely not in Kansas (or Missouri, my home state) anymore. In his world, if you played soccer you must have learned the game in prep school. This was 1971 and soccer was not a widely known or played sport in the US.
I spent a good portion of my time those days in some level of confusion. I was a reasonably bright kid. Introverted and fond of books of all sorts. A very perceptive nun in my parochial school persuaded by parents to channel me into a private boys school in St.Louis run by English Benedictine monks. Turns out I had indeed “prepped” without knowing so. I did so, however, with none of the social and cultural shaping that can be part of that environment. Intellectually overdeveloped and lagging or backwards everywhere else.
Fifty five years later, I’m closer to balance overall. There was an overall odd benefit to my unbalanced development. I became comfortable with confusion and not knowing. This was a long and slow transformation for someone rewarded for knowing answers. Turns out that clueless is just a starting point for figuring things out.
There used to be a show on NPR called Car Talk. Ostensibly about cars and car repair, it was really an ongoing seminar on how to figure things out by asking questions. There’s a quote from the show that is pretty good advice:
I fully realize that I have not succeeded in answering all of your questions. . .Indeed, I feel I have not answered any of them completely. The answers I have found only serve to raise a whole new set of questions, which only lead to more problems, some of which we weren’t even aware were problems. To sum it all up . . . In some ways I feel we are confused as ever, but I believe we are confused on a higher level, and about more important things.