Three Cheers for Doubt

I can't locate the article online, but February's Los Angeles Times Magazine has a wonderful little essay by the playwright John Patrick Shanley(Doubt). Here's someone who gives voice to my relationship to the world as a kid:

I was not exactly part of my time . . . I picked up what people around me were feeling. I heard what they said, but I did not participate. When people got worked up and started heading in some direction, I watched and walked along beside them, feeling their feelings, maybe even sharing them. But at bottom, they were not my feelings.

And in adulthood:

I was never a true believer. Not in the Catholic Church, not in Woodstock, not in the Vietnam War. I just couldn't get caught up in the whirlwind.

This is something other than skepticism, an orientation I have often been accused of possessing. Skepticism is grounded in a refusal to believe, an intractable resistance to getting caught up in the whirlwind, to use Shanley's phrase. This is inability, not refusal. Boy, do I get that.