This is written with love about all the introverts and extroverts in the world. I guess we are all one or the other or a combination of both, although the combination never seems to be 50-50.
I thought about the differences this week during a seven-hour journey in my car. These days, I have no music blasting as I did in my younger days. I use the time to think, much like, I suppose, an introvert would. And, for better or worse, here are the results of all that thinking.
If, for some unknowable reason, an introvert was locked inside a garden shed with no way to escape, this would not represent any sort of opportunity to panic, or even be very concerned, as long as someone kept sliding trays of food under the door from time to time. A week could go by and this is what he would do.
The suddenly incarcerated introvert would find and dust off a lawnchair, and seat himself comfortably in it. He would look around for something to read and seeing a lawnmower manual, would ingest every single word inside it, marvelling about how much he was learning. Then, to his relief, he would notice a recycling box full of old newspapers that were being kept to help start backyard fires. He would read every word in those newspapers, though they were months old.
Then, our ever-shy hero would nod off into pleasant naps now and then, and dream pleasant dreams. As time went by, he would notice various spiders and other bugs occupying the shed with him and he would attempt to befriend them.
But mostly, the introvert would use his break away from humanity to think. Good thoughts, bad thoughts, the subjects wouldn’t matter. He would think about his life and the lives of those around him and about what he might do if he ever was released from the shed.
In other words, leaving an introvert totally alone for a week is not exactly the best way to punish him, if that is what you had in mind when you locked him up. If it was punishment you wanted to inflict, you needed to take him to a place where 500 people were wildly celebrating something and leave him there with no way out.
An extrovert, on the other hand, is as different from an introvert as a dog is from a bird. If you locked up an extrovert in a monastery occupied by Trappist Monks who rarely speak from one year to the next, the extrovert would somehow have a square dance organized and underway within an hour of his arrival in his new digs and the head monk would be doing the calling. He would organize regular Saturday night hoedowns, weekly casual attire days, and happy hours at a local bar on Friday nights.
Introverts are oriented inward, and extroverts, outward. It has been ever thus. And it has been my observation that trying to get an introvert to be an extrovert, and vice versa, is like trying to get a left-handed person to write with his right hand. Our orientation to the world seems to be baked in at birth. In any family, raised in the same environment by the same parents, there will be a mixture of introverts and extroverts. Almost always.
I have no opinion on whether one orientation is better than the other, but I do know that it is painful, for example, for an introvert to try, even for a short period, to be an extrovert. And, I assume, the same would hold in reverse. An introvert locked in the monastery would settle in, put on a robe, and be hardly noticed by the end of his first day. An extrovert locked in a shed, even for a few hours, would kick out a wall and escape at his first opportunity.
But here is where I think the world needs both character types. I have noticed that it is usually introverts who create art, whether it be music, novels or sculptures, and it is extroverts who help those creations see the light of day. Elvis Presley, Anne Murray and Frank Sinatra never wrote a song in their lives, that I know of. But they gave the world wonderful renditions of what writers had created in their studios or their bedrooms late at night.
Some extroverts do create, some introverts do perform. But these are exceptions, I would argue. Stage fright is the introvert’s unwelcome but steady companion, aloneness plagues the song-writing extrovert.
So parents, teachers and preachers, please don’t spend much time, or any, trying to change the two “verts”. Be aware that they will not, maybe cannot, alter their personalities. Instead, find ways to encourage each character type along the paths that seem to have been set out for them.
The shy will create, the bold will perform. And the world will keep on turning.
©2018 Jim Hagarty
