When I’m stuck for ideas, I talk to a duck.
My son turns up in the morning and will randomly put something on my desk. A few months ago, he bought me a Psyduck for my birthday, as it’s my favourite. Sometimes it’s on my desk, sometimes, it’s in his toy box.
When I am looking to express my thoughts, I will hunt that yellow duck down. How apt for someone who wishes to explain things plainly – a Pokémon whose character is that if he gets too confused, he explodes.
I like that idea, of confusion, and detonation, more than I should. It’s a way of looking at life.
Talking to something that can’t answer
I’m not the first. Software people call it rubber duck debugging, from a book called The Pragmatic Programmer. You explain your code to a rubber duck, line by line, and somewhere in the explaining you find the bug. The duck doesn’t need to do anything. You find the bug because you’ve said it out loud, in order, to something that can’t interrupt.
Have you ever had the answer turn up halfway through explaining the problem to someone? Well, that.
I should be fair about this. There isn’t a clean study showing that talking to a duck, even a confused and potentially explosive one, works. The nearest evidence is about people who explain something in order to learn it, who end up understanding it more deeply than people who just read it again. I reckon that’s enough to make the duck worth a go, and not enough for me to promise you anything.
Why a confused one
I went on a one-day Buddhist retreat in Wales recently, in a medieval church, which meant Jesus Christ himself was looking down at me from a stained glass window for most of it. That’s what I thought about most of the time. The rest of the day was meant to be something else. I’d always assumed meditation was thinking about nothing, or thinking about your breathing. This was the other kind. You take whatever you’re feeling and look at it. What is that? Where is it? What does it look like if you turn it round?
What I took home was that I’m not in control of my feelings, and so my feelings aren’t in control of me. Which means I can look at them the way I’d look at something that belonged to somebody else.
That’s the job Psyduck does on my desk. The problem gets said out loud, it’s sitting in the room, and it’s his to be baffled by. I can look at it.
What I’m paid for
I get paid to listen to people explain their problems, so read this knowing that. I’d like to say I always have wise things to say back. A lot of the time the useful part is that they’ve had to say it in order, to someone who isn’t going to jump in, and they hear it themselves. I try not to arrive with the answer. If I turn up with a theory I’ll go looking for it, and I’ll find it.
The duck has never solved anything. I usually have by the end of my sentence.
