26 Jan I don’t know why but I can tell you …
When some of my Japanese colleagues translated my book, The Overweight Brain: How our obsession with knowing keeps us from getting smart enough to make a better world, they asked me to write a short introduction. This was in 2019. In the four years since then, we have done many things together and I have huge appreciation for their interest, their friendship, and all they have taught me. Today I found the Word doc of what I wrote back then. I share it with you as a public appreciation for these dear colleagues and a reminder to avoid explanation.
Years ago, I was invited to write an autobiographical chapter for a book called Narrative identities: Psychologists engaged in self-construction (Yancy and Hadley, 2005). I accepted, being flattered to have been asked and excited by what I would discover by writing such a thing. I didn’t have any idea of what to share with readers about my life. I just knew I wanted to avoid any kind of explanation as to why my life has gone the way it has. That’s because I think explanations are what people make up in order to give some pattern or coherency or meaning to life’s twists and turns, jumbles and messes, joys and sorrows. And I have come to believe very strongly that we not only don’t need explanations but, even more, that they do us damage. Explanations are a huge part of the knowing paradigm, which is the subject of this book, The Overweight Brain.
I cannot tell you why I wrote The Overweight Brain, nor why it is, apparently, believed to be worthy of the hard work of translating it into Japanese. I do not know and I do not think we can ever know. But, without knowing, I can tell you several things.
I can tell you that the title came to me first. I wrote it down and kept looking at it for many days. And on one of those days I said to myself, “That’s a great title for a book! Maybe I should write it!” And I did.
I can tell you that I am very happy that the book has been successful in ways that are important to me. It invites people to think and talk about things they never thought or spoke about before, and it gives people permission to create some new kinds of conversations with themselves and with others.
I can tell you I am thrilled and honored by this Japanese translation of my words, but more than that, by the generosity and enthusiasm of the translating team and other dear colleagues for their embracing and expanding “non-knowing growing” and the global development community that practices it.
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