Einstein did not say, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing again and expecting different results.” According to Nature magazine, it was Rita Mae Brown in Sudden Death (1983). But other people do say it, quite often to me, because I do the same thing and expect different results. I make no great claim to sanity and half-believe in the capacity of inanimate objects to make spontaneous recoveries, and in my experience often the results do change.
Last week we stayed in a holiday cottage on a small estate. Some of the other residents let their dogs run loose, which meant that it was difficult for me to leave the house and almost impossible for me to do so alone. But I was the last to leave, and the bins needed emptying. I looked around carefully, took a long-handled broom for self-defence, and set out, but as I approached the bins three dogs ran over, barking. I didn’t mean to, but I found myself sprinting back to the house, rubbish and broom in hand. I made it, slammed the door. After a while the dogs went away. I thought about just taking the rubbish home with me in the car, which was near enough to the house that I knew I could make it before the dogs got me, but it was a hot day, a long drive, a small car, and there were fishbones in the food waste. Eventually I tried again, counting breaths, pacing myself, and though the dogs did come back I made myself put at least the food waste in the right bin before I fled. Same thing again, different results. No old fish bits in a hot car.
[ Sarah Moss: Irish dog-walkers are kinder than English dog-walkersOpens in new window ]
But of course I wasn’t exactly doing the same thing again. There had been change. I had weighed my terror of the dogs against my distaste for fishy decomposition, and decided to try harder. Maybe the dogs weren’t exactly doing the same thing either, maybe they felt less aggressive second time around. Maybe the wind carried my scent to them later in the process, maybe I conveyed a whiff of determination as well as fear.
A psychologist friend of mine often observes that siblings are not raised in the same family because the family changes along the way
I think there’s always change. I think we never do the same thing again; I think the idea of doing the same thing again is based on a level of control of situations that, outside and probably usually inside a laboratory, is outright fantasy. After all, one of the criteria for the value of scientific data is that the same actions undertaken by other people another time result in the same consequences. It’s not taken for granted, and often doesn’t happen. Time continues to pass, the world of next time is not the same as the world of last time. Even in such a trivial case as a sticky lock, sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. You do the same thing – put the key in it and turn – but some change outside your control and observation determines success or failure in opening the door. Damp, maybe, vibrations from passing traffic. There are variables we don’t cause and can’t see. It’s perfectly sensible to hope for, or fear, a different result.
I do the same thing and expect different results, but thinking reality remains the same is sheer fantasy
If you’ve read the literary canon, you know how to think like a bourgeois white man
Sarah Moss: Until recently, I assumed everyone had infinite worlds of light, sound, scent, taste and touch in their heads
The problem isn’t me and my sourdough and my kale. Access to nourishing food should be a right
A psychologist friend of mine often observes that siblings are not raised in the same family because the family changes along the way: births and deaths; maybe relocations and emigrations; richer or poorer; in sickness and in health. My kids have had different stages of their school lives in different countries. One of them thinks it’s normal to take taxis and the other thinks buses are for when you’re carrying too much to walk. One of them remembers four grandparents and a great-grandparent and has more of a handle on intergenerational trouble, the other has grown up in a very small family with little conflict. We’re approximately English: one of them remembers the last Labour government, for the other, Britain had always been Tory. Not really the same environments at all, and that’s just the differences I can see now.
We move through the world, and also the world moves through us. Our interactions with it, at the level of locks and also children, are interestingly mysterious. We’re not in control, which means it’s almost always worth trying again.