behave or . . . .

All the world’s a stage. No one might exemplify that age-old adage better than being inside my head. 

Swimming in the open ocean gives me a new relationship to my body. Normally, imagination takes over my mind, eclipsing my body - which corresponds with my tendency toward abstraction. 

Depending on my body as a vehicle pulls me away from abstraction. In a strange way, it is grounding, and tilts toward representation - portraying me as being of a certain nature. 

Consider a relationship that is not visible to us, except in the mind’s eye. 

What is the relationship these three realities have with each other? Does the calmness of the ocean’s surface hide something dangerous and threatening? What is the sky telling us? 

These questions have haunted humans ever since they began sailing on the open ocean. 

At once literal and imaginative, the shifts in layering and degree of representation from idea to thought both hold my attention and pull me into a state of reflection. 

Opening a world where the laws of cause and effect are not apparent. An unsettling feeling, a reminder that nature exists beyond our control. 

Despite all we know about the environment and what we are doing to it, can there be another, less palpable realization? As much as we call the Earth our home, we are strangers here. 

Being guests, however brief or long our stay, we might wish to think seriously about how we can be more considerate to our host, even as it is indifferent to us. 

In grasping that fundamental fact, we can start a series of contemplations that go beyond what was previously attained. 

Merging the aesthetic of nature and the niceties of social behavior. Waiting to see what will emerge. 

In the book Quiet, by the American writer Susan Cain, its argument is simple and has not been seriously answered since.

Somewhere in the twentieth century, Western culture adopted what Cain calls the Extrovert Ideal, the belief that the ideal self is “gregarious, alpha, and comfortable in the spotlight".

Introversion became, in her phrase, “a second-class personality trait”. The strange part is how many people this demotes.

Cain’s figure is a third to a half of the population, and the number behind it is real: a 1996 sample of 914,219 people found 50.7 per cent of them tested as introverts. Half the room has spent a century being told to come out of its shell.

What does that half get right? The instinct to hang back, think first, keep our own company and answer to our own inner weather is a strategy.

A very old one, and some of the most loved characters in fiction have been demonstrating it for two hundred years. 

Emma Watson, Mr Darcy, Bilbo and Katniss, plus the pizza-store study that changed how psychologists see quiet people. Why introverts never needed to come out of their shells.

Cain opens Quiet with Rosa Parks, whom she counts, along with Chopin, Dr Seuss and Wozniak, among the introverts to whom we owe the most. Parks did not make a speech on the bus in Montgomery. 

She sat where she was and declined to move, and the refusal was enough. That is the shape of the whole argument. Darcy reads the room by holding back from it. Bilbo saves the party by being the one who thinks. Katniss survives the cameras and then closes the door. Jane keeps a room nobody can enter.

None of them came out of their shells, and it is hard to name what any of them would have gained by trying. The shell was where the good work was being done.