Is my wrist broken? No.
Am I sure?
Pretty sure.
I analyze damn near everything anyways, and this one is going to get more than normal amounts of analysis. I replay the scene in my head –
***
I struggle to pull open the rusty door and I throw the suitcase; it clears. I get ready to time the jump. Try to land with both my feet at the same time and run out the momentum.
I’m going when – right precisely then – a man appears on the ground, “NO, NO, DON’T!!”
Too late, I was already going. But my timing is broken. As I go to jump, I half-hesitate at the command not to jump. My right foot hits before my left, I can’t transfer the momentum well, and I just transfer all my kinetic energy right into the ground.
A crowd gathers around me.
This all feels eerily familiar.
I chill out lying on the ground for a while, scuffed and bleeding slightly but not too much.
They tell me not to move, but after feeling around for damage and not finding any, I get up slowly and try to do the joke-around-with-bravado thing –
“I’m fine, I’m fine, sorry about that.”
They’re saying something about medicine, sit down, don’t move. I’m led to a bench – everyone is friendly but very concerned. I think it must look worse than it feels. I check again slowly, I’m still pretty sure there’s not much damage.
There’s some blood in my mouth. I double-check with my iPhone front camera, just a little cut on my lip. It’ll swell up tomorrow but nothing serious. Major scrapes on right forearm, my right sleeve on my jacket is falling apart now.
After checking I’m okay, the crowd disperses. Nice people.
The wrist is worrisome, but I’m relatively sure it’s minor.
Feeling reassured, I make a joke in my own mind and then wonder what the hell I was thinking.
***
I wasn’t, of course. Thinking. It was just a reaction.
I was getting out of Morocco to Turkey, where I was expected and am now writing this while drinking a strong Turkish coffee. I had a 1PM train ticket to the airport, and was waived inside by the guard and told “platform 2” at 12:30PM. Getting onto the train, 5 minutes later it started moving off.
That’s odd – would they leave early?
“Umm, bonjour, is this going to the airport? Aeroport?”
– “No, Marrakech.”
Shit.
Miss the correct train, miss my flight, get stuck in Morocco for two days or buy another air ticket for $500 to $700 – the second cheapest price out of Casablanca that day.
So I just went, fast. I didn’t calculate. Morocco is also somewhat funny – I take a lot of trains, and they don’t, I think, normally accelerate that quickly. And I dare say that if at the very top of my jump the guy hadn’t yelled “NO!!” – I think I would’ve timed it, landed it, and forgotten about it.
Still – the upside there saved me a couple days or a few hundred dollars. The downside was a broken ankle, broken wrist, broken computer, or worse. Fixed upside infinite downside bets aren’t the kind you want to be making.
***
It’s later than night in Istanbul when I start replaying the scene in my head.
Stupid on many levels. Very stupid. Totally not advisable.
And yet, perhaps the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. A lot of the stupid, dangerous, idiot things I’ve done in my life had negative first-order consequences that hurt – but helped me evolve much faster.
I’m having a hard time sleeping, my whole body is throbbing, and I’m feeling rather miserable in a sheer physical sense. While I felt quasi-euphoric after the jump – it’s still strange and nearly mystical to me how our biochemistry responds to pain and damage – I’m now just in that dull throbbing zone, tired and fatigued but unable to sleep.
Thoughts tend to lead to more thoughts, and it’s easy to get worked up into a bad mood when you want to sleep but can’t.
But then, I turn to another thing that’s often very unpleasant in the moment, sometimes much more painful than any physical pain – meditation.
“This is a rare opportunity,” I reason, “to train and master my thoughts when injured and fatigued. I haven’t been injured in a while. I should take advantage of it.”
And thus I just lay there, focusing on my breathing, letting the pain wash over me and dissipate, letting the fatigue wax and wane, just being there. Inspirational and subtle and perhaps brilliant thoughts eventually start coming, but I let those wash over and pass too. Soon enough, consciousness isn’t; I sleep great.
***
I feel a mix of great and like hell when I wake up, two different processes of thinking and feeling competing for which will have its say. I take caffeine, ephedrine hydrocloride, and acetometaphin, then go searching for a copious amount of water to drink, followed by black coffee for breakfast.
As my mind turns on and revs up gradually, I first note that I like Turkey, and then I sit to musing through history and philosophy.
I wonder about events which are not-so-smart in isolation, but collectively lead to building the character of those who take them.
By my estimation, George Washington had a 50% chance of being killed on a day at least three times in his life – twice in his first two major engagements as a young man, and then at the disastrous defense of New York in the opening salvos of the Revolutionary War.
You multiple together 50% * 50% * 50% chance of not getting killed, and it would be fair – if you’re just using numbers – to say Washington had at best a 12.5% chance of accomplishing the major feats of his life.
50% might even be too low from his first major defeat – he had four bullet holes through his gear, two in his hat and two in his clothing, and had three horses shot from under him. So maybe the odds were even worse.
Looking at Japanese history, what were the odds that Oda Nobunaga was able to survive his daring counterattack at the Battle of Okehazama? 10%? 20%? That becomes one of the pivotal moments in Japanese history, though no one knew it at the time.
The question is whether you can eventually stop taking those sorts of odds and settle down. Nobunaga, of course, was ambushed and assassinated by his own general, Akechi Mitsuhide. Nobunaga was bold, daring, innovative – and not defensive or protective of his gains. He made his way onto the grand stage through boldness and daring; he exited the grand stage by not adjusting away from those measures.
***
In the end, I’m feeling sore but grateful for the soreness, though maybe it’s easier to rationalize that after nothing serious happens.
And yet, most people seem to be so afraid of bad things happening that they never really live.
I’m not sure bad things are even so bad. It seems like, oftentimes, it’s not the gains we get from daring that make us, but rather the losses and damage we sustain that are most profitable.
The Greek tragedians – and the tradition later taken up by Shakespeare – showed people with much worth and value get unmade by fatal character flaws.
A fatal character flaw is like an undetonated land mine in the forest near a populous area. It will detonate, sooner or later.
There are two ways to get that land mine away – the first is to step on it, and take the damage you take. The second is to carefully arrange for searches and anti-landmine initiatives.
The problem with the latter way is that you never quite know when you’re finished. Yes, it’s infinitely better to learn from books and feedback from smart people that you’re doing something wrong than it is to suffer from your errors.
But if you have a buried character flaw, something wrong with your thinking or style of operating – a land mine on the path you’re going to walk – it’ll go off sooner or later. Being able to withstand the shock and force of it now might be better than leaving it lurking.
***
I just got a useful reminder of the fragility and finiteness of life.
I can’t help but feel like that was a disastrously stupid decision in isolation, but that a few such stupid decisions over a decade – even with the commensurate downsides happening – would quite possibly make for a much stronger run of successes and enhanced abilities.
It doesn’t compute well, and the conclusion is ambiguous and unsatisfying – but it’s what I’ve got. A contradiction in terms, that occasionally making terrible bets that pay off negatively lead to higher payoffs. How does one operate on that basis?
Frustrating.
Unable to crack this strategic/philosophical nut, I jokingly decide to update my mental “list of things I’ve done in my life” –
27 May 2014
Location: Marrakech, Morocco
Status: Has not jumped off of moving train
28 May 2014
Location: Casablanca, Morocco
Status: Has jumped off of moving train
I shake my head, sigh, and laugh. There’s more questions than answers here, but the dull pain is giving way to focus. Memento mori – indeed.