The Betrayal of Experience
Laurence Gonzales almost had his hand bitten off by an ashtray.
As a child, Mr. Gonzales was fascinated by his grandmother’s ceramic ashtray, which was fashioned in the form of a coiled rattlesnake. Decades later, while hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains, he came across the ruin of a stone house. Picking through the rubble, he spotted it among the debris: his grandmother’s ashtray!
As he reached out to pick it up, the ashtray flicked out its tongue. Mr. Gonzales froze, backed away, and lived to tell the story.
Even Laurence Gonzales admits the absurdity of having mistaken a real rattlesnake in the mountains for an ashtray in a living room. He uses his experience to demonstrate how the mental models we create for ourselves can lead us into folly. Nostalgia, familiarity, and wishful thinking often assert themselves so powerfully that they overshadow knowledge and common sense. We become so focused on what we expect or what we want that we make decisions with no rational justification — sometimes with catastrophic consequences.
Practice makes permanent
Mr. Gonzales rallies plenty of evidence to support his thesis. He cites the case of a policeman who trained himself to disarm assailants by snatching a gun from the hand of a fellow officer again and again. After each attempt, he would return the gun to his colleague for another try. When just such a situation arose in the line of duty, the officer neatly disarmed the culprit, then automatically handed the gun back as he had done so many times in practice. Fortunately, he survived the encounter.
Lynn Hill, an internationally acclaimed rock climber, interrupted the rhythm of her preparation routine to tie her shoe and forgot to tie her harness. Her subconscious mind registered her shoelace as a harness strap and allowed her to proceed to the next step of her checklist. She survived only because tree branches broke her 72-foot fall.
The great irony in these stories is how experience and training sometimes work against us. In mountaineering and law enforcement, as in every potentially hazardous field, exhaustive preparation conditions men and women to react instinctively and reflexively, since a moment’s hesitation may mean the difference between life and death. In situations of crisis, however, our instincts may propel us in the wrong direction.
The mind has a mind of its own
The human brain is equipped with a mental filter that screens out distractions and helps us focus on what is truly essential. But when the unexpected or unfamiliar contradicts our subconscious expectations, the system that usually works to our benefit can blind us to dangers that may threaten our very lives. The more our actions become governed by reflex, the less likely we are to recognize the novelty of the unexpected by pausing to consider how a new situation does not fit the model of our training.
Consider this seemingly pedestrian lesson from Proverbs:
“Hear instruction, and be wise, and refuse it not.”
The sequencing of this proverb seems inverted: How can one refuse instruction after already accepting; how can we refuse wisdom once it is already ours?
King Solomon teaches us that the continued acquisition of wisdom is necessary to ensure the retention of wisdom. One who believes himself so wise that he need not learn further will ultimately reject new wisdom, either because it might challenge the knowledge he has already acquired or because he refuses to accept that he has anything more to learn at all.
In contrast, one who is unsure of his or her wisdom will approach every situation with caution and give every encounter his full attention. Like a novice mountain climber checking and rechecking his harness, such a person will err on the side of redundancy rather than risk a single careless oversight. When we take instruction to heart, we will never become overconfident in our own ability.
The world is our live-fire classroom
Such an approach to life requires considerable conditioning and self-discipline, first to learn what we need to know and then forcing ourselves to pay attention to details that have become second nature. But the world itself provides the best training ground, for it is filled with wonders that never fail to awaken awe and inspire fascination in those whose eyes are open to seeing them.
If we wish to remain uncorrupted by our own impulses and biases and protect ourselves from the seductions of the material world, we can never reckon ourselves sated with the wisdom of experience or imagine ourselves impervious to error. We must aggressively seek out new lessons hidden behind the curtain of familiarity to compensate for the pernicious fallacy that we have grown wise enough.
So how do we train ourselves to continually see the novelty of a world that has grown overly prosaic? Just like naturalists flee the distractions of our cluttered society by escaping into the wilderness, similarly we have to recalibrate our mental filters. We have to learn to reprocess the unfamiliar rather than screening it out altogether.
Laurence Gonzales offers a strategy he learned in survival school: STOP — Stop; Think; Observe; Plan. And although this approach is designed to help us avoid potential physical danger, we can adapt his principles to the danger of missing out on all the emotional and spiritual pleasure life has to offer.
Stop. Caught up in the rat race, we see nothing other than racing rats. Break the routine, if even for a few minutes. Get off the treadmill and give yourself an opportunity to look at the world with fresh eyes.
Think. What are the possibilities? What if I give up one power lunch for a picnic in the park? What if I unplug myself from the computer screen in favor of a bike ride, a boat trip, or a walk in the woods? What if I yank out my ear buds and let my mind ponder the true value of my own existence?
Observe. All the wonders of technology pale before the miracles of creation. The veins of a fallen leaf. The symbiotic genius of bee and flower. The tranquil music of life-giving water as it trickles over stones or washes against the shore. The reassuring harmony of all the sights and sounds of our planet blended into a symphony of life that testifies to the divine composition of the universe.
Plan. How do I become a player in the orchestra of human society rather than a spectator who dozes through the performance? How do I integrate into my life moments of spiritual meaning to punctuate the monotony of material routine? Precisely in the ways we have already described: Plan to give charity, to visit the elderly and the sick, to smile at strangers, to study words of ancient wisdom, to challenge old assumptions by seeking out new interactions.
Our world can be a place of darkness and danger, but only if we walk through it dreamlike, with our eyes closed to the miracles around us and to the limitless opportunities for illumination. When we stop long enough to break the conditioning of habit, when we listen to the voices that speak to us from across the generations, a whole new world reveals itself before us, inspiring us with possibilities for transforming our lives through the extraordinary spiritual reality that awaits our discovery.
Excerpted and adapted from Proverbial Beauty: Secrets for Success and Happiness from the Wisdom of the Ages.