Missing my own bed

The school trip is an experience that is almost entirely a mystery to me. My mother’s over-protective tendencies, combined with our families financial restrictions, meant that any trip that had any perceived physical risk, would go out of the city and/or last longer than an afternoon was not for me. I have a clear memory of my grade 5 teacher (Mr. Finnegan, I believe) personally calling my mother to assure her that I would not be at high risk of grievous head trauma if I went roller skating with the class. And, other than sore feet and a significant amount of slow, wobbly turning, the outing was perfectly safe.

It took that level of intercession to change my mother’s mind, but an overnight trip was still out of the question. I understand what fueled her fear-I was a sickly kid, hospitalized several times for asthma attacks, and perpetually plagued with respiratory illness, ear aches, and sore throats. (For the medically curious readers looking for environmental triggers, the answer to your question is yes, my father smoked inside of the house for the entirety of my formative years). So my mother’s anxiety was understandable, and it transferred in some part to me. I would look at any potential variance from my normal routine and immediately examine it for health risks and other dangers. This all fed a general fear of the unknown.

But as you’ve witnessed in this blog, I’ve gone through a real change in the way I see my own life, and the things I want to do with it. And this new ambition and excitement has pushed me past my old reservations and into new unexplored experiences. This last weekend I went, by myself, to Ottawa for the Liberal Biennial Convention, and I discovered that the emotional reactions I would have had as a school-age child on a similar trip had simply been deferred until now. There were times when I was lost, confused, and scared, usually when trying to find a bus stop, or waiting to fall asleep in a strange bed.

The first night away from home was especially potent. I was physically exhausted from working until 11PM the night before, then sleeping fitfully before embarking on a 14 hour day of travel. I stumbled out of the convention centre at 9:30, with only a tenuous understanding of where to catch the bus. A few blocks of trudging through the snow passed, my luggage dragging my arms down and straining, and I staved off the desire to freak out, cry and panic long enough to find the bus stop. On the packed bus hurtling into the darkness, a sense of profound loneliness overwhelmed me. I was far away from my wonderful son and my loving wife, heading farther away from the only people I knew in the area, towards an apartment somewhere in the darkness. I was homesick.  Thankfully, I had enough presence of mind to remember that being exhausted and sleep-deprived always makes me overly sensitive and wildly emotional, so I resisted the urge to totally break down, and instead I crawled into bed and waited for sleep. Night 2 was much better, though the homesickness was still present.

Along with the normal, negative emotions that come with being away from home independently for the first time, came the positive experiences. I made a slew of new friends, people who made me laugh and made me think. I had a new. And whenever I was in the convention itself, I felt like I was supposed to be there. I wasn’t nervous about making a mistake or being disliked. I was confident.

And now I see the incredible value in giving your children the chance to experience the world independently. There is a point where protecting them from potential but unlikely harm inhibits their personal growth and their self-esteem. You can’t know how well you can handle a strange situation until you survive one.

Putting on your fancy clothes

There’s a scene in the movie “Step Brothers” where Will Farrell’s character decides that he needs to be a grownup, not a 36-year-old man-child, and he asks his therapist for help (I’d put a video clip of it here but I couldn’t find one so you’ll have to make do with a text quote):

“…and the thing I wanna ask you, to help me… To show me how I can be a grown-up. Do I carry my high-school diploma around? What do you do with your hair? What happens if there’s inclement weather? Where do you…? What do you wear? Can you wash clothes in the dishwasher?”

As I gather up my fancy clothes and pack in preparation of my trip to Ottawa for the Liberal convention this weekend, this scene keeps playing through my head. I feel like an old kid sneaking into the grownups party, and I don’t know what I’m doing. How do I properly pack a garment bag? Do I have a garment bag? Will anyone look at my shoes? Don’t mistake this bewilderment for fear or hesitation. I’m very excited, and my excitement is consistently overruling my traditional anxious fretting. Anytime a detail pops into my head that I haven’t really thought about yet, I’m shrugging it away with a simple “I’ll figure it out”. Confidence and excitement are great friends to have along for a trip.

And much more than the political wheeling and dealing and hobnobbing, I’m thrilled to see my nation’s capital. I had never realized how profound my patriotic love of this country really is, but the prospect of seeing the home of our democracy has me giddy. Maybe I’ll walk up Parliament Hill for the first time in my life and I’ll get a face full of icy slush thrown on my by a passing cab, and the illusion will be broken. Even if that happens, I suspect I’m still going to have a pretty inspiring moment.

I’ll try to blog during the weekend, as I get tossed about by the byzantine machinations of the political beast, with people on all sides of me pitching their ideas  trying to sway me to their side. 18 hours ’til Ottawa!


	


	





	

		
It’s not about the facts, jack.
	


	
	

		
Logic. Reason. The triumph of the intellect over emotion. What a fanciful dream I have held to, where I assumed the majority of humanity are relying on rational evaluation to chart out the course of their lives. Fanciful, and woefully inaccurate.


It’s a positively Victorian perspective, to think of the mind as the ruler of the heart, and for the longest time I have championed the idea that a person’s choices are ultimately made by the rational psyche, overruling the wild gut reactions. This is the kind of belief system that you can only really cultivate by staying isolated away from large groups of people, and avoiding them as they debate and discuss a decision. When you wade into the middle of a large group of people with a startling variety of opinions, you start to realize how disparate we really are. The middle ground that you assume is there for the taking turns out to be a razor-thin strip of land between a countless array of tribes shouting at each other ready to go to war. Once we ally with a side, it’s incredibly difficult to be talked out of that choice.


If you have a chance, read the book “Risk” by Dan Gardner. It talks about the two different decision-making processes that we have: the slow and methodical logical method or “head”, and the quick rough estimate method or “gut”. There’s a lot of evidence that the quick decisions our gut makes are easily influenced, and prone to error because of the complexity of modern life. The snap decisions that would have kept our ancestors safe while hunting and gathering does very little to help us pick a car to buy or to determine how dangerous a disease is. And of course, there are scores of ad men and PR women using those gut reaction triggers to try to shape our decision-making into an outcome that’s favourable to them. As an example, the rate of breast cancer incidence for women under 40 is less than 4%, but almost every breast cancer awareness campaign or donation request will feature a woman in the prime of her life. This makes the gut believe that it’s a disease that affects younger women, when really the biggest risk factor for breast cancer is age  (2/3 of breast cancer cases are in women over the age of 60). And since the gut rates risks to younger people as more serious than risks to the elderly, so you’re more likely to donate more because of this. I’m not singling out cancer charities as the only ones using emotional manipulation as a tactic: everyone selling you something is using your gut reaction to swing the tide in their favour.


The most obvious sign of being manipulated is the use of fear-inducing images and words. When someone declares ominously that there is “chaos lapping at our shores” they’re trying to get your gut to send out a panicked alarm. If your gut gets scared, your head has a heck of a time convincing it to go along with a different decision. And the worst part is that, because fear is such a great selling tool, there is a constant stream of new things being invented to be afraid of. I hope that we reach a point of fear saturation, where our guts just stop flinching so easily when a black and white commercial booms onto the screen to warn you about increasing crime (not true) or huge rise in cancer rates (also not true). But what does our post-fear culture look like,when companies can’t sell you on the menace of germs or daylight robberies or the terrors of restless leg syndrome?