One of my college physics professors had an aggravating habit of saying “It’s intuitively obvious that…” before launching into another incomprehensible explanation of how objects move. My brain would be twisting itself into a pretzel as I scrambled to write something sensible in my notes; meanwhile my classmates would be nodding like three dimensional calculus was child’s play.
Until one day we talked about an object moving on a frictionless surface. By way of illustration, the professor used the brief example of standing on a flat piece of wood and trying to scoot along the surface of a frozen puddle or pond. Since I had done this very thing many times while waiting for the school bus on frosty winter mornings as a kid, for once I was nodding along and easily grasping the concepts behind the equations.
My fellow classmates–who, to be fair, may have been Las Vegas natives who had never really experienced ice–were perplexed and even argumentative, because what he was describing made no sense to them.
It dawned on me then that “intuition” is largely dependent on one’s personal life experiences, and how transferrable they are to new circumstances.
Admittedly, the rest of that semester wasn’t really any more comprehensible than the first part had been. But my frustration and sense of imbecility dropped to sufferable levels as I reminded myself that I wasn’t too stupid to understand physics, I just lacked life experiences that would make the connections intuitively obvious.
When I first started going on travel adventures, nothing seemed intuitively obvious. It’s not at all like reading a book, where you squirm inside because the heroine has just gotten herself into a pickle and you simply cannot put the book down for dinner or a good night’s rest until you know for sure she’s going to make it through everything okay. Oh no. Real life has a way of rudely re-writing the pleasantly idealistic adventure you imagined inside your head (and painstakingly planned down to the last minute detail).
But after enough experiences, I started to develop some resilience to adapt to the unexpected. I didn’t really think about this until the time I returned home from a week in the Caribbean to find that my luggage hadn’t made it back with me. My initial annoyance was pretty mild as I trekked over to the edge of the airport to catch the train to a station near my work where I’d left my car. At least it was at the end of my vacation and not the beginning, I thought. And at least they would deliver it to me when they found it. Since we’d arrived an hour later than planned, I was more concerned about catching the last train of the night so I wouldn’t be stranded at the airport. (If I had to pay for a taxi or an Uber, the cost would kind of defeat the purpose of not parking at the airport all week…but I knew that was still an option too.)
As I settled into my seat on the train, I realized I didn’t have my car keys. I searched through the pockets of my carry-on bag three times, then rolled my eyes as I remembered I hadn’t taken them out of the (now missing) suitcase when I repacked everything to come home. I sat still for a moment, recalculating how my night was going to go. I couldn’t get my car as planned, but the train would take me to a stop that was only a couple of miles from my house. I considered the upside for a moment—had I parked at the airport, I would have gotten to my car before discovering I had no keys, and would have missed the last train home. On the downside, it had snowed while I was away enjoying sand and sun and surf, and I wasn’t dressed for a two mile hike across icy sidewalks at 20*F. I considered calling a friend to pick me up, but it was after midnight and everyone I felt comfortable calling for a ride was already in bed asleep. I checked Uber (which I’ve only ever used while traveling, not at home), but there weren’t any cars in the area.
But you know what I did have? The trusty windbreaker-poncho I’d taken to packing every time I went on a trip, because it was a versatile extra layer that didn’t take up much space. I pulled it out of it’s convenient drawstring bag, and the rumpled layer of plastic-y nylon was a much-welcomed trapper of body heat, particularly the hood I pulled over my head.
I also had fun memories of a tropical week spent with my brother and his family, something I never would have imagined would be possible a decade or so ago. We were in a financial position to pay for a vacation, but our adventures were among people who lived in poverty, a stark reminder to my brother and I of where we grew up. So I found myself sincerely grateful for a warm home and a comfortable bed at the other end of my cold trek, which would be relatively short.
I reflected a bit on the fact that I wasn’t freaking out at all. There was a time when any deviations from my plans caused great internal turmoil. I’m usually a control freak, and this night had not gone at all the way I had planned. I was adjusting pretty readily to each new hiccup, like it was no big deal. I liked that feeling.
I remembered standing in the rain next to my brother in Jamaica. Our pre-arranged driver was not at our designated location outside the gate, and my sister-in-law was glaring daggers at the crowd of eager taxi drivers who kept calling her Big Boss Lady while she shouted colorful metaphors into the phone at the woman who insisted the driver was “almost there” for over an hour. (Her frustration was compounded by the fact that Jamaican English is so heavily accented that it’s practically another language, that the people on the phone kept transferring her to some hotel, and that we were about to miss the Catamaran she had arranged as part of my brother’s birthday celebration.)
One of the drivers lamented the fact that we were all standing in the rain (a light shower that came and went several times while we were standing there) instead of letting him take us wherever we wanted to go. “Think of the children,” he said, as though they were suffering. My brother laughed. The children were teenagers, and since we’re from the desert, the rain showers were something of a pleasant novelty. We weren’t abandoning our pre-arranged driver because (1) we’d already paid for the trip (an amount of money that was not insignificant to us), and (2) we had no idea where we were going to meet the Catamaran.
My brother and “the children” and I were standing off to the side, letting my sister-in-law work it out because we knew there wasn’t much we could do to be useful, and trying to “help” would only get in her way. I realized part of the reason I wasn’t frustrated is because I hadn’t been the one to make the plans, and I had no expectations for the day other than hang out with my brother for his birthday. Which I was already doing anyway, standing on the side of a road surrounded by tropical green trees and rain, swaying to the rhythms of Bob Marley playing on my niece’s cell phone. I smiled, enjoying the intuitive feeling that everything really was gonna be alright.
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