Scenario: I get into my car, which is always parked in the driveway (usually behind my brother’s larger car), put the gear into reverse, use my side mirror to back down the driveway, and then proceed to where I’m going, in a hurry. Same as every day.
Scenario: I get into my car in a hurry, put the gear into reverse as usual, look out my side mirror, and start to back down the driveway. Only this time, I don’t get very far before I hear the crunching sound of metal on metal as I suddenly realize that I have backed into my brother’s car, which is parked behind me today. Fml. Thank goodness I have been only moving very slowly or else there would have been a lot more damage, although my license plate seems vaguely triangular now that it’s slightly bent in the middle, along with part of the rear of my car behind it.
Scenario: I approach my car, seeing that my brother’s car is parked behind mine, and note to myself that I need to move forward rather than back up at first so as to maneuver my car around my brother’s before backing down the driveway (there’s room for that). I get into my car, put the gear into reverse, and almost back up anyway. I stop myself just in the nick of time and realize - WTF, I even saw that his car was behind mine and thought about it, and still almost backed up into it.
Because of these events, every single time I’m about to back down the driveway now, I have to repeat over and over in my head, “don’t back up, don’t back up, don’t back up,” or assure myself, “yes, you can back up today.”
New Scenario: Back in high school... I get into my car and head to church - a place nearby that I know how to get to very well, as I’ve gone to the same one since I was little. I talk on my cell phone all the way there, until I arrive and suddenly realize that I have arrived not at church at all but at my high school, in the opposite direction from where I was supposed to go. That’s definitely not the only time this has happened to me... most recently I was driving home from my cousin’s baby shower in Allentown, and when I got back to an area that I recognized and knew well, I turned off my GPS, since I could easily get home from there. Except all of a sudden, I found myself arriving back at Villanova (where my heart is, perhaps) instead of at my house.
What does all this strange behavior mean? It means that when we don’t pay close attention to where we’re going or what we’re doing, sometimes our brains go into what I like to call Auto-Pilot mode. Humans are creatures of habit. When we do the same thing every day, our bodies know that behavior so well that it’s even inscribed in our muscle memories and we don’t even have to think about what we’re doing in order to do it. As the expression goes, “it’s just like riding a bike”... when we’ve learned something so well, it becomes difficult to un-learn it. For me, that became apparent when I went about 4 or 5 years without skiing at all, but when I started doing it again, it wasn’t long before I got right back up to the level I had been before I stopped. Because I’d been doing it since the age of 4, my body just couldn’t forget how to ski.
I’m just left to wonder what these sorts of auto-pilot habits really mean to our lives. Could these examples just be mere scratchings of the surface of all the behaviors that we can’t seem to shake no matter how hard we try - and probably don’t even notice how helplessly engrained in us they are? Our hands reaching into that bag of chips in front of the television, smoking pot day after day (I say pot because it lacks the physically addictive element of nicotine like cigarettes), letting those two beers turn into seven? What about non-behavioral examples - like the beliefs we’ve been taught from the youngest of ages that we can’t seem to shake no matter how much evidence is piled against them? While this mechanism of human habit probably came about as a crucial survival instinct - like not being able to forget how to swim once you learn (faced with a body of water in a dash from a predator, your ability to swim can kick in and save the day) -- I can’t help but wonder if nowadays it’s really less helpful than destructive.
No comments:
Post a Comment