The Self-Imposed Intellectual Tragedy
Playing life's Uno reverse card before life plays it on you.
Making the wrong choice does not immediately constitute an intellectual tragedy. An intellectual tragedy only occurs the moment you recognize that you made the wrong choice. It's that distinct moment we feel in our brains when the truth smashes into our thick skulls like the Kool-Aid Man. Oh yeah. Like life's little Uno reverse card.
I witnessed my first such tragedy when I was about six. I'd seen things I recognized as sad before then, like when my mom dropped and broke her favorite tea mug coming down the stairs a year earlier, but that wasn't a tragedy, per se. She didn't "choose" between letting the mug slip from her fingers and, you know, not doing that. It was just an accident.
But when I was about six, while we were on vacation, I witnessed a bonafide intellectual tragedy. We went to a gloomy wharf, stood on a rickety dock, and prepared for a smelly morning of fishing. There was a man already there doing some fishing of his own and before too long, he caught one. I was gripped watching him pull an actual living creature out of the water. He lowered the fish to the dock and knelt down as if he was about to administer CPR. He then took out his pocket knife and placed it in front of him. Now there were two things lying at the edge of the dock: his knife and the gasping fish. He arranged his patient to get a better angle to remove the hook, and as he pulled his hands away the fish lurched violently toward the water, bumping his knife in the process. Two objects once inert were now sliding toward the water, and our kneeling friend had a choice to make. The cognitive bias of loss aversion states that the amount of pain we endure for losing something is far more than the corresponding pleasure we feel for gaining that same thing. In Lamen's terms, the fish was new and shiny and he didn't want to lose it, so the knife never stood a chance. As he placed both hands on the sliding fish, his knife gave him a wink, thanked the rest of us for coming, and performed a backward two-and-a-half-somersault pike off the dock and into the murky deep. It was breathtaking.
As the applause died down, I looked at the man and saw in his face the recognition of the consequence of his choice. That solitary moment of awareness is where tragedy lives. The depth of the tragedy would only be determined by his demeanor in the 5 seconds after this moment. It's conceivable this moment isn't a tragedy at all. That the knife was just some cheapie he bought at the dollar store on the way to the wharf because he forgot his good knife at home. But it's also possible this knife was a gift from his grandfather, who despite encouraging the man to use it often and not be too precious about it, imbued it with a deep sentimental value that recently intensified when he passed away. This would make the knife irreplaceable and the tragedy all but catastrophic.
As far as I could tell, the man's reaction was closer to the former. Annoyed but amused, he proclaimed, "I grabbed the wrong one!" and shed zero tears over the knife. I kept a count. I guess he keeps Grandpa's knife on the shelf in front of the photo of him from the war.
If we're lucky, we trundle along through life only encountering tragedies we're equipped to handle. But sometimes we encounter something so antithetical to our way of thinking, we turn off our curiosity and shut our mental curtains. This lack of mental liquidity locks our minds up like a bank vault, preventing us from "updating our software" (usually in the areas we need it most). To avoid this, it's good practice to keep our minds loose by remaining open to the likelihood we're not, in fact, omniscient. So we must encourage ourselves to stay liquid. We must seek out our tragedies and find the holes in our opinions (and more importantly our "facts").
In The Art of Racing in the Rain by Garth Stein, there's a passage about intentionally inducing a slide on a wet track, thereby reversing your role from hapless bystander to commander of his own fate. The track is wet. The car is going to slide. But if I volunteer to slide instead of waiting around for it to happen to me, I get to pick when and how:
"Rain amplifies your mistakes, and water on the track can make your car handle unpredictably. When something unpredictable happens you have to react to it; if you’re reacting at speed, you’re reacting too late...If I intentionally make the car do something, then I can predict what it’s going to do. In other words, it’s only unpredictable if I’m not…possessing… it.”
It's not easy. It takes practice. And it only leads to more questions. When I was young, I thought the trees shook to make the wind, as opposed to shaking as a result. When my Mom told me, "No, the wind blows first, causing the trees to sway", my little head exploded. And now, my simple, clear answer to why the trees moved transformed into a question: If the trees don't make the wind, what does?
We all have plenty to keep us occupied and it's not always practical to be aggressively introspective. But seeking out our "tragedies" voluntarily will always win against hiding from them. Because tragedies are not optional. And when you hide from them in the bushes, not only will they find you and require your attention at the most inopportune time, but they'll use their machetes to do it.
Thanks for reading.
Feel-good act of the week:
Contact someone you haven’t talked to in a while. Ask how they’re doing. And don’t tell them all about how you’re doing, either. Just listen.
Have an awesome weekend.
- Tim