Why Doesn’t George Clooney’s Sister Act?
In your journey to the very heart of you, to pinpointing what makes you special and unique, have you ever felt you were different from your brother and sister? Or cousins? Or closest friends?
Of course you have. You haven’t merely felt it. You know you’re different from them. You know you don’t laugh at the same jokes, excel at the same subjects, get excited by the same sorts of challenges.
Have you ever wondered why?
You certainly aren’t given much in the way of guidance to sort it all out. Both at school and later at work, you’re told a great deal about how genders, generations, religions, and races differ, and why you should be respectful of these differences. But what about people whose backgrounds are more similar to yours? What about people who come from exactly the same background as you? Why, despite all these similarities, are you still so different from them?
I was lucky enough to have two amazingly talented siblings. My brother, Neil, showed such promise at the piano that, when he was nine years old, he was removed from the school music classes and handed over to Mr. Cowdroy, a tiny wizard of a man who could teach him how to cultivate his musical gifts.
My sister, Pippa, was equally gifted, but her instrument was dance. At eleven she was offered a place at the Royal Ballet School, which she turned down—“Why would I go do that when they’ll make me stop seeing my friends and playing sports?” Good point. So, she stayed in regular school and was happily whacking hockey balls about when, two years later, the Royal Ballet School came back and again tried to recruit her to devote her life to dance—apparently, she had that rare a talent. At which point she relented, and we never saw her again.
Not quite, but off she went to become a professional ballet dancer for twenty years, with all the dedication and discipline that this profession requires.
I displayed no such gifts. My dad was sure I had some, so he kept thrusting instruments into my willing hands. I say “willing” because I would’ve dearly loved to have had the musical gift. I saw how much attention my brother and sister got, and I wanted some of that. Each Christmas, on Boxing Day, we would put on a von Trapp–like show for our friends and neighbors, with songs and dances created and performed by the Buckingham family. Or rather, the songs were written by my father and performed by my brother, and the dances were choreographed and performed by my sister.
I was given a bowler hat and a trombone and was told to stand in the back—they would let me know when to blow it.
The trombone was the last in a long line of brass instruments pressed upon me by Dad. Cornet, trumpet, French horn—my lips were too full for these little mouthpieces. Euphonium, flugelhorn—my fingers couldn’t seem to make sense of the valves. And so to the trombone. No valves, just a slide, and a nice big mouthpiece to fit my nice big mouth. I loved the instrument itself—how it looked on my shoulder, how it sounded when I moved the slide in and out, the fancy-feeling velvet of the case. But, sadly for all in earshot, I couldn’t figure out how to use it. In my hands the slide was always more of a danger to those around me than a means to make music. “It’s a musical instrument, not a weapon!” cried poor Mr. Todd, my instructor.
I spent a lot of my first decade of life wondering why I was so bad at music. I could read the notes on the page. I could even tell you what the key and tempo markings meant. I just couldn’t translate them into music. I tried. I persevered with that darn trombone for more than ten thousand hours. I improved from terrible to merely bad.
Which was frustrating. And confusing. Why had my brother and sister been gifted with fluency in the arts, while I, after all this effort, driven by all this desire, could barely speak a word? I didn’t know. I still don’t. I still wish I had been given the music gene. If I could come back as anyone in my next life, it would be a combination of my brother and my sister. And David Bowie.
You may have felt same thing. Maybe not the David Bowie part, but the Why don’t I have the same gifts as my closest relatives? part. We have the same upbringing, the same gene pool, so why am I so different from them?
It’s strange, isn’t it, because no one else seems the least bit interested in giving you a language to talk about it, or a framework with which to understand it. You want to know: Am I really so different from my sister? If I want to become more like her, or less like her, can I, if I work really hard at it?
And yet look around you—at home, at school, at work—and none of the books, the lessons, the training programs offer you any answers at all.
The differences of gender, nation, religion, region, sexual orientation, and generation are interesting and important … but irrelevant to your question.
Yes, you can learn about someone’s background and biography, as though a person’s personality is created solely by what happened to them as they grew up. You’ll learn how Venus and Serena Williams’ father trained them in tennis like a drill sergeant; how Neil Armstrong got his flying license at fifteen, before he’d even passed his driving test; how George Clooney was inspired to become an actor by his famous aunt Rosemary Clooney; and how Oprah found her calling only when she was fired from her news reporting job and “demoted” to hosting a little-watched local talk show.
These kinds of facts are true, but they don’t help much with your question of why you’re so different from people with virtually the same upbringing as you. To figure that out, you’d need someone to explain why Venus and Serena play tennis so very differently despite sharing the same coach, who taught them exactly the same techniques. Or why Oprah craved the spotlight while her sister, Patricia, had a lifelong dream that lay in the relative obscurity of social work. Or why, while Neil Armstrong was pioneering his way to the moon, his brother, Dean, was intent on becoming a bank manager. Or why George Clooney’s sister, Ada, despite having Rosemary as her aunt, became an accountant specializing in payroll.
You are so different from your brother and sister for the same reason that George is so different from Ada, and Venus from Serena: no one has ever had a brain quite like yours. Your galaxy of connections spirals in different directions and angles and ways than everyone else’s. So, quiet the well-intended voices of your teachers, your parents, your team leaders, your mentors, and start getting in touch with the unique patterns in your brain.
At its simplest this means start paying attention to what you find yourself paying attention to. Yes, school and work are going to force you to focus on certain subjects and classes, but can you find a way to filter out some of their noise? Can you, instead, catch sight of yourself catching sight of something? Something unprompted by anyone else. Something that you see, that makes you laugh or intrigues you. Something that others, when you describe it to them, may not quite understand. Something that, when you’re alone—late at night, early in the morning, walking someplace—you find popping unbidden into your mind.
Watching the Watchers
What captures your attention isn’t random. It’s part of a pattern. And so, to find your loves, your pattern of attention is the place to begin.
My very first inkling—and at the time, it was barely an inkling, more like a tiny soupçon of an inkling—that I might have been blessed with loves different from my brother’s and sister’s came when I was nine years old. It was the first sports day at my new school, and all of us boys were kitted out in our white T-shirts, white shorts, and white plimsolls, standing around on the playing fields and watching the action.
Each of us had a colored stripe of ribbon sewn onto the side of our shorts to designate which team we were on. My stripe was purple, which meant I was in a team called Churchill’s. I hadn’t asked to be placed into this team, and we didn’t put on a sorting hat to direct us to one team or another. I was just told that this would be my team for the next five years, and that the chief purpose of the team was to know who to root for during sports day, and, more importantly, who to root against.
Yes, I was told, my best friend may have been placed on Stratton team—red stripe—or Sarnsfield—green stripe—but from now on I was to cheer only for purple-striped Churchillians. This had seemed quite odd at the outset, but by the time the first sports day came around, our respective loyalties and animosities had been successfully drilled into us.
So, sports day finds me standing around with a group of about thirty boys, some with purple stripes, some with yellow, red, green, blue, all of us watching as the high-jump finals get underway.
When the first boy, a red striper, runs up and leaps, a movement in the circle of boys catches my eye. Several of the boys watching have lifted one leg as the jumper made his leap. I turn back to watch the next competitor, and in my peripheral vision I catch the movement again—several of the boys lift their leg just as the high jumper makes his attempt.
This is strange, I think, and so I turn my attention away from the competitors and toward the boys watching. As each boy runs up to the bar, almost all the boys make some sort of lifting movement with their legs. Almost as if they are willing him over the bar. I’ve never seen this before. I turn to the boy next to me—Giles Murray, who’s on my team—and ask him why he’s lifting his leg.
“What?” he replies. “No, I’m not!”
I keep watching him out of the corner of my eye, and he does it again when the next competitor runs up.
“See! You did it again!”
“No, I didn’t,” he hisses back.
Well, now this is really strange. Giles, who’s a good guy and not normally strange at all, is lifting his leg when another boy attempts a jump, and is then denying that he’s doing it.
I look back at all the other boys and see that, with each jump attempt, the leg lifting keeps happening. And the leg lifting is not limited to boys on the same team. Greens lift their legs when yellows are jumping; blues do the same even when the jumper’s a purple. Some boys just rise up on their tiptoes. Others actually lift one foot completely off the ground. A couple even stick one leg out almost horizontally, as if they were kicking an invisible ball.
I’m entranced.
Later that day, I go around asking some of the older boys why they were lifting their legs during high jump. They tell me to shut up. I ask the gym teacher about the leg lifting. He doesn’t tell me to shut up, but he shakes his head in a No idea what you’re talking about sort of way. I ask my science teacher about it. She thinks I might have been mistaken. I ask Mom, Dad, my brother. I’m fascinated by this bizarre group leg lift. Yet not only does no one have an explanation, no one else seems to share my fascination.
I never got an answer. From anyone. But the phenomenon didn’t go away just because no one could explain it to me. Each sports day I would watch the high-jump watchers, and each year I’d see the same unchoreographed routine of involuntary leg lifts. And each year my inkling would strengthen: I am aware of something that others aren’t, and for some reason—why, I don’t know—I appear to be the only person who’s geeking out on it.
Did I know this would be the first fascination of many? That I would use this fascination to fashion a career as a researcher? That I would devote my life to noticing and trying to explain real-world, observed human behavior? That twenty years later an Italian scientist, Giacomo Rizzolatti, and his team would discover the existence of mirror neurons, and that the leg lifting was a manifestation of our instinctive response to mirror the emotions and actions of others? That the leg lifting was, in spite of the school’s effort to create team loyalties and animosities, proof of each human’s natural empathy for the experiences of another?
No, I didn’t know any of these things. All I knew was that I had seen something real, that it delighted and intrigued me, and that no one else seemed to pay attention to it in quite the same way.
In the face of the musical gifts of my siblings, I held on tight to this one small sign of difference.
You can do the same. You’ll find yourself laughing at something no one else does, or remembering some detail everyone else forgot, or being mesmerized by the packaging on cereal boxes, or the feeling of salt water on your body, or the distinctions between a toad and a frog.
And when you do, your initial inclination might be to dismiss what you saw in yourself, particularly if no one else saw what you saw or felt what you felt. But try to let these tides of conformity flow past you. To find yourself, as Myshel discovered, stand firm in the truth that your loves are not strange. They are you, your Wyrd, your very essence, the source of all that is special and precious and powerful about you.
Pay attention to what you pay attention to, with confidence and without apology.
And then, to dive deeper into the detail of your loves, look carefully for three signs of love. We’ll explore them in the next few chapters.