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Saturday, February 10, 2007

How many folds?

How many times should you fold your toilet paper?

We humans want answers to the important questions of life. Several years ago a success coach was addressing a large number of young professional women. The audience responded gratefully when she met their need to know how many times to fold their toilet paper, especially before a business meeting. (Twelve layers*, she said.)

Don't doubt that this was an important question. You too have many particularly vivid memories of a parent or a neighbor or a friend imparting some such information to yourself. I can remember clearly a college roommate's telling me what his father had told him about shaving with or against the grain of the beard and, before that, my dad's showing me how to fold...toilet paper. Oh, you don't just wad it up?

And there are other questions that don't seem so mundane. "Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?" to quote Paul Gauguin's famous painting, "D'où venons-nous? Que sommes-nous? Où allons-nous?":

We want answers to such questions. And to get them we often look for someone we trust to tell us. A Tony Robbins or a Wayne Dyer or an M. Scott Peck or Norman Vincent Peale. The last two are dead now, but they were big not many years ago. Or someone who claimed to speak for or from God, like Moses or Jesus Christ or Muhammad. Those last ones have stood the "tests" of lots of other people following them and of their having done so for a long, long time. And two 19th century American prophets, the Latter Day Saint Joseph Smith and Jehovah's Witness Charles Taze Russell, have had their respective international followers for a while, too.

Whichever source we accept is almost always one that our friends or our family or the members of our community accept. If it isn't a natural philosopher or Moses or Muhammad, but it is Joseph Smith, then it's likely the Mormons for us too.

It helps if whatever source is near to hand gives answers more or less like the ones we want to believe. In our rebellious stage, if we had one, we were disinclined to believe what our family or our neighbors believed. We left, to return later perhaps as a prodigal child, to look anew at the source familiar to our childhood and adolescence.

If we've traveled or read a bit, we may now be aware that that source isn't the only one. If it had been Jesus, it might now include the possibility of a humanist philosopher or of Gautama or Muhammad. The question may have become whether to choose one of these or...?

[more to be unfolded later]

______________
*How many folds to get twelve layers depends on whether you're using one- or two-ply paper. The speaker didn't cover this, but I've found that an efficient way to get twelve layers with one-ply paper is to
  1. Unroll twelve squares (or an equivalent length).
  2. Fold in half (lengthwise).
  3. Fold in half again.
  4. Fold over one third.
  5. Fold over the other third.
With two-ply, unroll six squares and skip the third step.

10 comments:

  1. Folding toilet paper is an abomination! We all know it should be bunched, and why we should put up with the hoity toity folders is beyond me.

    As for shaving, people who shave against the grain should be shot. It's a violation of what is natural.

    They're all going to hell anyway, so I see no reason that we shouldn't get in a few licks ourselves.

    Not only that, but......oops....sorry....just waxing a little judgmental. I'm okay now.

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  2. Peace Moristotle,
    Folding toilet paper? People don't do that? wow...and i thought i had too much time on my hands.

    Forging a completely alien path is not an easy thing to do...most people will end up reviewing their childhood path and walking along a familiar trail.

    Either way, if you walk with sincerity and a thirst for the Divine, I doubt you will be "lost."

    Take care O' wayfarer and looking forward to more unfolding from you.

    Your morally struggling friend :)

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  3. Tom, I'm trying to find the words to describe accurately the comic persona you seem to have adopted for your comment! <smile>

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  4. Peace, Maliha,

    How do you conceive "a completely alien path"? When I think of an idiosyncratic path—that is, one that I might forge for myself—I think of something constructed from God-given insights, in the general sense that they might be either true mystical revelations (but my own rather than someone else's) or things I figure out by my own "light of reason." This hardly seems to me to be "alien."

    By the way, the first time I read your comment, "i thought i had too much time on my hands," I thought I understood it, but now I realize I don't...Humor sometimes eludes me!

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  5. Peace Moristotle,
    I botched that whole attempt at a joke. I mean to say people actually fold toilet paper (or worry about it) and then said I thought I had too much time on my hands.

    As much as I appreciate technology, writing is so hopelessly two dimensional, its frustrating.

    alien path was the wrong phrase to use... i have to think of this some more.

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  6. Me practices origami while on the crapper. Not too certain if me gets twelve layers, but me does have fun with the different animals me produces.

    Me knows of many folks that accepted the beliefs of those that were diametrically opposed to the beliefs of those around them. Maybe it were because they asked similar questions.

    Which be more important Mr. Moristole, the questions we ask or the statements we believe without question?

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  7. Dear Maliha, Ah, yes, I wonder how much time humans spend folding toilet paper!

    Granite must have been "frustrating" to Michelangelo, but look what he wrought! Whether writing is "two-dimensional" or not (I think it has more dimensions than granite), nevertheless, like granite, it can be worked, with patience and cunning and distance. Part of distancing is to look at one's own words as much as possible through the eyes of imagined readers. Not easy, but indispensable.

    I look forward to what you may discover about "alien paths."

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  8. Dear Monster, did you have a sense of the reasons why the folks you know who "accepted the beliefs of those that were diametrically opposed to the beliefs of those around them...asked similar questions"?

    You've set me wondering, now, why I myself ask these questions. A distant cousin who recently read my blog seemed to think that I was "unbelieving" because that was a trait of the men in the ancestral family that she and I have in common. "Why can't those men see what seems so obvious to me?" she complained. I don't accept the "ancestral man thing" as an explanation (of this or much else), so I'm having to look elsewhere for the source(s) of my questions.

    But of course I agree with you that "the questions we ask" are more important than "the statements we believe without question," but that assertion too calls out for understanding. More important how, in what regard?

    I think you have, by your comment, set me a topic for my next post. Thank you for that!

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