One of my favorite books as a child was Perplexing Puzzles and Tantalizing Teasers by Martin Gardner, who for decades was a popular math and popular science writer. I didn’t know then that Gardner was also a magician, but it didn’t surprise me when I later learned this, for his interests spanned science, philosophy, religion and literature, not unlike many magicians, including me. (Other typical interests include music and origami, which I also share.)
Gardner wrote for Scientific American for 25 years and in 1999, MAGIC magazine named him as one of the "100 Most Influential Magicians of the Twentieth Century.” I can certainly speak to his influence: That book of his I encountered at age eight set the tone for my own curiosity and a way of thinking that continues to this day.
And all because of my favorite brainteaser in Perplexing Puzzles, “Mr. Bushyhead’s Problem.” Give it a whirl, and then we’ll talk about hope:
“Mr. Bushyhead’s Problem,” from Perplexing Puzzles and Tantalizing Teasers (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1969)
Mr. Bushyhead was driving through a strange town when he decided to stop, park his car, and get a haircut. He asked a boy where he could find a barbershop.
“We have only two barbers in this town,” said the boy. “One of them has a shop at the north end of Main Street and the other has a shop at the south end.”
Mr. Bushyhead walked north on Main Street until he reached one of the barbershops. It looked as if it hadn’t been cleaned in months. Cut hair was all over the floor. The barber himself needed a shave and his haircut looked terrible.
Mr. Bushyhead walked to the other end of Main Street until he came to the second barbershop. It looked neat and cheerful inside. The floor had been swept. The barber was neatly dressed, freshly shaved, and had a neat haircut.
Why did Mr. Bushyhead walk back to the first barbershop to get his haircut?
The answer? Mr. Bushyhead reasoned that since there were only two barbers in town, they must cut each other’s hair. The messy barber with the messy haircut gave the neat barber his great haircut, and the neat barber gave the messy barber a terrible haircut. Mr. Bushyhead opted for the better barber.
This puzzle gave birth to a way of thinking that has helped me throughout my life. I call it theflip-it mentality. When puzzled, frustrated or feeling hopeless about a particular situation where there seems to be no solution, I try to flip my thinking and imagine what the opposite of all the apparent or obvious answers would be. The best expression of the flip-it mentality I’ve ever heard comes from a saying popularized by the Danish physicist Niels Bohr:
Standing opposite of one profound truth may very well be another profound truth.
In other words, the answer to a truly troubling situation may exist way down at the other end of Main Street.
Let me offer a real-life example. Years ago, after losing a property line dispute with a neighbor, my brother Tom needed to move one side of his yard’s chain link fence about a foot. One Sunday afternoon, he and I and our brother-in-law, Jeff, a big guy who I have seen lift a sofa by himself, got to work. The first order of business was to uproot the four line posts that were anchoring that side of the fence, posts buried deep into the ground.
Easier said than done! We dug down and around the base of the first post to expose the buried portion, which was housed in cement. With about 600 collective pounds of male ego on the line, the three of us tried in unison to wrest that hunk of iron from the earth. We pulled and tugged, grunted and swore, stopping frequently to wipe sweat from our brows and keep from dislocating our shoulders. Try after try met with the same result: That post wouldn’t budge.
Suddenly it came to me. “Stand back,” I said, grabbing Tom’s sledgehammer. I then pounded the top of the line post with all my might, driving the post further and further down into the ground until the cement shoe shattered. I threw down the sledgehammer and slid the post up and out of the ground as gently as young King Arthur withdrew Excalibur from the stone.
After Tom, Jeff and I stopped laughing, we did the same with the other three posts and finished the job.
You could say that today there are a lot of fences that need moving or tearing down, walls that have gone up that only serve to separate when interdependence is essential to our survival, and disputes with neighbors and would-be neighbors that seem intractable and the people involved intransigent (kind of like my brother’s neighbor way back when). What are our options? We can’t go around applying a sledgehammer to everything we want to change. Where is the hope?
As someone who has studied the history of religion, I know that much religious thought down through the years has encouraged people to look outside of themselves for hope, whether “hope” is called salvation, forgiveness for one’s sins, or just plain love. The salve this kind of thinking applies is that, if we accept a personal savior or look to draw upon some other external spiritual source, we’ll be okay inside, too. To quote a classic Yellow Pages ad campaign from 1989, “If it’s out there, it’s in here.”
And, as someone who has noted that as church attendance has plummeted over the years, rates of despair and hopelessness have shot up—as detailed in a recent CDC report on the mental health of young people in America—I understand that this mode of thinking just isn’t working for many of us. Could it be we are looking at the wrong end of the street? Maybe hope doesn’t live somewhere out there in an apparent messiah, a catchy political slogan, the holy trinity of wealth, fame and power, or the latest self-help programs being hawked on social media. Maybe hope is all the way at the other end of all that, somewhere deep inside each of us.
One of the most beautiful expressions of this reasoning comes from the great Hindu philosopher and teacher, Swami Vivekananda, who introduced Hinduism to the West in the 1890s. In a lecture on maya, a Sanskrit word meaning magic or illusion that names the Hindu concept that separateness from the divine is just that, an illusion—Vivekananda said:
Just as in your hymn it is said, “Nearer my God to Thee,” the same hymn would be very good to [a Hindu], only he would change a word, and make it, “Nearer my God to me.” The idea that the goal is far off, far beyond nature, attracting us all towards it, has to be brought nearer and nearer, without degrading or degenerating it. The God of heaven becomes the God in nature, and the God who is nature becomes the God within this temple of the body, and the God dwelling in the temple of the body at last becomes the temple itself, becomes the soul and the [person]—and there it reaches the last words it can teach.
And here, Vivekananda says, is where we find what we’ve been looking for. He continues:
He whom the sages have been seeking in all these places is in our own hearts; the voice that you heard was right, says the Hindu, but the direction you gave to the voice was wrong. The ideal of freedom that you perceived was correct, but you projected it outside yourself, and that was your mistake. Bring it nearer and nearer, until you find that it was all the time within you, it was the Self of your own self…. Then we shall know that we are free.
Where is the hope in today’s world? Maybe closer than we think. I’m convinced it is coursing through our veins whether we know it or not. Even if you don’t feel it, it is still there, waiting for you to go to the end of your own Main Street, where messiness hides pure joy. Because hope can’t be out there, anywhere, or for anyone, if it isn’t first in here, deep down somewhere in the well we have been filling up all our lives—fed by first-loved books, a kind word from a stranger we never forgot, the night you saw a shooting star, the job you left out of self-respect, the epiphany you had standing in line at the checkout counter when the toddler in the shopping cart in front of you turned and smiled. In her face you saw the future, and all of your worries suddenly became small. Hope lies within. Now go and find it.
Behind the Curtain
Writing is messy, and I wax and wane between finetooth editing and trusting first instincts. I originally included the link to a commercial from that 1989 Yellow Pages campaign. Then I removed it, because first, it was almost next to the absolutely heartbreaking CDC report released just weeks ago. Second, its humor was dated, and I realized that what I thought was funny in 1989 would actually be inappropriate for this or any other column in 2023.
I would like to retain the point, though, that inappropriate humor and a report on hopelessness may be at opposite ends of the street but are still part of our world. Although they are separated by 34 years, that old ad campaign and the report share a kinship that is as fresh as your morning coffee: Each speaks to our constant yearning, the Yellow Pages on how to find a resource, and the CDC report documenting that many of our young people searching for internal resources can’t find them.
To flip it further, rather than me tell you what this all means, what do you think? What would a spiritual Yellow Pages look like for our times? What is the listing for hope? Is there something you could tell someone in despair that you yourself need to hear? Does it start with this: that you are loved?
