Who Got Harmed

Life would be better and easier if we didn’t harm each other. We may or may not mean to inflict some pain or consequences on someone else, and we may or may not even derive some joy or satisfaction out of it in the moment, but in the end – the long run – we have hurt ourselves, even though it’s often not apparent right away. Payback doesn’t work. It just does more damage.

Best to live and let live. Wherever you can muster the internal fortitude to carry on and do your own thing, the better. It’s not in our nature sometimes, but enlightenment may require rising above our nature.

Blind Spot

Aside from our other senses, we are temporarily blind to the half of the world located behind our head at any given moment. Some call that our blind spot. However, it’s not completely blind because we’re aware of the fact that we aren’t seeing it, not to mention the fact that the blindness is usually pretty easy to remedy when we need to, though it can be dangerous if we’re not paying attention.

Contrast that with our actual blind spot. Ironically the very place where the eye connects to the brain (via the optic nerve) is an area on our retina where we do not see – the blind spot. We do not notice it, and are thus unaware of it, because our brain fills the gap by extrapolating the likely content from the surroundings. We make it up. Fortunately this defect in our vision is small enough that it rarely causes a problem.

Combine those two characteristics and there would be significant issues. Imagine large areas of your vision that appear to be functioning fine, but are in fact being made up by your brain. We would call that being delusional (or one of a few other maladies).

Yet we are, in fact, delusional to some extent. We roll through life with our programming while being largely unaware that we’re thinking and acting according to it rather than objectively processing all the input we receive. These blind spots in our awareness – things we haven’t been programmed to be sensitive to – are all around waiting to trip us up. Most of the time the stumbles are minor, however, on occasion we can go pretty far astray and not be aware of it. We can hit the wall and crash, or we can do more subtle damage that we don’t see for a while, or we get what appears to us as having been randomly blindsided.

There is no solution to this in the moment. No easy shortcut to improve your odds beyond simply acquiring more wisdom as you experience more of life. You must start by accepting that what you see and believe is not an objective reality. It is simply what your brain has selectively chosen to make you conscious of. The best you can do is educate yourself and work at being informed and aware. Work at empathy by forcing yourself to be sensitive to others. Prepare within reason for mishaps so you can recover. There is a discipline to managing the risk, but in the end it’s impossible to eliminate it all. Being prepared includes the perspective of knowing we can’t be completely prepared. We must still be willing to act. To risk that we may be stepping into something that isn’t as it appears. Once we recognize how often this actually happens in our lives it could help us reconcile the fear we have when we do see the potential pitfalls. The risks our limbic system chooses to put in front of us are often as overblown as the risks we don’t see that are glossed over. Even the seemingly sure things had them. We just weren’t aware of it.

Ripping the Band-Aid Off

Though speeds are higher than ever, drivers are hardly ever killed in race cars anymore. Their construction has undergone sweeping changes in the past 15 years, much of which has been to make them safer.

F = ma

Force equals mass times acceleration. It’s one of the simplest formulas learned in physics. When 3500 pounds of metal slams into a concrete wall at 220 m.p.h. the violence tells us there is plenty of mass and (de) acceleration. The human body in the car, while having far less mass, still undergoes acceleration that’s often fatal.

So most of the technological changes have revolved around slowing down the crash. We can’t count on the driver being able to slow the car down, but we can use the car to change the deceleration curve for the human. Make the deceleration take longer and the force is more manageable. This, of course, is why modern cars crumple and disintegrate upon impact. They spread the force out over area and time. Air bags further slow the human’s deceleration. Saves lives.

Some will say that when the bad comes it’s better for it to be sudden, like ripping off a band-aid. Take the sudden pain and it’s over with sooner. This rings true for things like band-aid removal, tooth pulling (sometimes), pimple popping, taking bad tasting medicine, and a variety of other things.

But have you ever watched a nurse remove the bandages from a burn victim? That’s not a ‘rip it off’ scenario. How about when a close relative dies? Most people, while not wanting the other person to suffer, seem to appreciate having time to prepare themselves for it. In certain circumstances some of the initial stages of grief can be processed before the boom lowers.

There’s so much wisdom around us telling us to slow down in our lives. To take things in and live in the moment. That often applies to delivering the bad as well. Ripping the band-aid off is better for the deliverer, but not necessarily the recipient. Delivering the news is a burden. And since the deliverer has the power of choosing… We’re all inherently a little selfish, and pretty effective at rationalizing what we want, so unless we’re able to stop and think through it we can sometimes default to sudden, when gradual and gentle would work better. It’s selfish, but understandable.

When there is bad news, ask yourself whether you’d rather find out your mom is dead, or that your mom will be dead in a month. There’s no good way to do it, but where possible time will provide a means for things to sink in, which reduces the force of the blow.