A sweary—and expertly punctuated—weblog.

Monday, June 13, 2011

The ergodic life

Today I flipped off an old lady while biking to campus.

And I liked it. Even now, I'm feeling pretty good about our interaction!

The situation: I was pulling up on my bike to the last stoplight on my route to campus, a quiet intersection on a peaceful, heavily-forested street. The light had just turned red, and I came to a stop about five feet behind a fellow biker. A car, pulling out in front of us, slowed down as the driver—a woman in her sixties—looked at the biker in front of me with unusual intensity. As her face contorted into a disapproving scowl she pointed at the other biker, mimed with her hands onto her head, and mouthed "helmet". She was rebuking him for riding without a helmet!

I don't know what my fellow biker's response was; the light had turned green and we were both starting to pull out. But as I began moving to the intersection, she caught my eye and I realized I was about to get the same silent lecture: a chastening glare, a ridiculous miming with both hands, and an agitated mouthing of the word "helmet".

I hesitated a moment, an irritated scowl undoubtedly on my face, before deciding that my rage was sufficient for all men and that this aggression would not stand. I twisted to face her departing car and offered up my middle finger. My only regret is that, in hesitating that small handful of seconds, I may have missed my chance to make my salute within her field of vision.

Cue the obvious objections. Yes, I realize that riding without a helmet is relatively dangerous and that I probably should wear one. Yes, I realize I returned rudeness for rudeness. Yet I don't feel guilty. If you're a family member or a close friend, it's your prerogative to express your concerns about my safety. If you're a police officer and I'm in a state that requires helmets (I'm not), I'm willing to take a ticket or pay a fine without complaint. I'm more than happy to abide the confines of the social contract in which I participate. But nowhere does that social contract mandate that I be squawked at by an old hen who can't tell her children apart from strangers on the street.

After my retaliatory gesture, my mind jumped to a hasty generalization: where the hell does this old bag get off gesticulating a safety lecture to random passersby? Or, more particularly, at what point in your life do you decide it's your privilege to do so? When do you become Harrison Ford, yelling at the kids to get off your metaphorical lawn?

I bring this up not to deliver a mostly-unjustified diatribe on the generation ahead of me, but to discuss a fear that's been gnawing at me lately.

I've written here before that I'm afraid of growing old and dying, and that really hasn't changed. I'm coming to terms with many of the implications: I've pistol-whipped the first signs of fatness into submission, I'm steeling myself against the indications that my hairline is beginning its flight northward, and I'm learning to live happily under the soul-crushing weight of inevitable mortality.

But I'm terrified of the stagnation of my mind. I'm scared of my brain growing dull and inflexible. I'm worried that as I get older, I'll fall into the fallacy of assuming that life is ergodic: that the average over my life experience is indicative of the average over all people's life experience. I'm worried that at some point I'll become sufficiently comfortable with how I'm living my life that I presume to tell others to live it the same way. That I'll be the one shouting at other people's kids to put their helmets on.

Much of my fear springs from the fact that I have no practicable way of avoiding such ossification. The only way I know to combat this tendency is to continuously discard things I once thought I knew. If you think you've got something all figured out, it's remarkably difficult to learn about that something, so I try to take old conclusions and routinely put them up for review. So far, if I may be so bold, I think it's worked out pretty well.

But it comes at a cost, and don't know that I can keep this up forever. Sure, I'm aiming for an academic life, and an academic life should bring with it constant reexamination and reevaluation. But someday it'd be handy to be an expert on something. (I'm pretty sure search committees and tenure boards, not to mention students, will appreciate it.) And it's hard to become an expert when you're constantly dropping knowledge out the back of your mind in order to preserve your tabula rasa—assuming you can keep up the patience and mental sharpness to do so in the first place. If I want to achieve my dreams, it seems, I'm forced to compromise on something I consider a defining part of my character.

Maybe that's the price we pay for stability. Perhaps the cost of an established life is that I have to grow up, settle down, and entrench myself in a few worthwhile—yet finite—principles. Perhaps I'm doomed to become old. And stubborn. And stodgy. And, like it as not, to incite young, insufferable know-it-alls to make obscene gestures in my direction.

2 comments:

tyler pulsipher said...

If there were a law requireing a helmet of course it would be different, but you still acted foolishly and deservered to be repremended. Your poor health-related choices increase medical insurance and taxes (for public health canpaigns) for the rest of us as you increase the total statistical probability for adverse, expensive consequences in hte population. I grant that you had eveery right to respond the way you did, and I would be sorely tempted to do the same thing to "old lady who couldn't see over the steering wheel," but engaging in risky behavior is not your perogative when your actions will affect others. The argument "it's my life and my choice" doesn't work hardly anywhere anymore as all your poor (and good) decisions and behaviors affect others.
As far as your fears about losing your mind, good luck with staying sane and alert! Do crossword puzzles! :-)

Tyler

Chad Can Plan said...

They say that foreign languages are really good for preserving mental capacities. So take up Latin again, or Spanish, or even Finnish. In any case, I will wear a helmet because one day at UF I was walking to my building when I saw a student fall off her bike and hit her head on the curb. She sat on the ground twitching while a person with medical training saw she was OK. This red-asphalt lite taught me to wear a helmet and be a (potential) good bicyclist.
I'm also my district's bike coordinator at work, so I take a professional interest in this (hahaha).

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