Another gray, chilly day, and I’ve been thinking about how there are essentially two kinds of people in the world: the “Nothing Bad Will Ever Happen to Me” people and the “Another Bad Thing Is Around the Corner” people.
Though maybe there are people who fall in between.
But the “Nothing Bad Will Ever Happen to Me” (let’s call them the Nothing Bads) don’t ever seem to realize they can become the “Another Bad Thing Is Around the Corner” (Another Bads) in a moment.
This occurred to me reading about the latest small plane crash. Latest because there seem to be a lot of them lately, since the gutting of the FAA.
But people go up in those little things anyway, and currently it seems like they are even less safe than they were, which wasn’t all that safe to start with.
Somehow, despite all the issues even large commercial jets are having, people blithely believe they will get from point a to point b. I read in this most recent one, the plane’s fuel caused all the cars on the street where it crashed to burn.
So there were people who did not decide there was no risk that wasn’t safe, they were just at home, doing their home thing, and then this. From what I saw, though, no one on the ground was injured.
It’s difficult, once you’ve experienced the bad, especially if it’s more than one thing, to even imagine being a Nothing Bad. I’ve always been risk averse, it’s in my nature, but the idea that whatever good fortune got you into the private plane in the first place will hold, like a protective bubble, that’s not something that fits in my brain.
The people who got on that plane thought they were going to get to where they were going.
I wouldn’t have gotten on the plane in the first place.
Which leads to an entire universe of conversation about risks and limiting yourself and never truly being able to know how things will turn out. As someone who has a not-so-silent movie of all that can go wrong constantly going in the background, the idea of being confident of a path with no awful things ahead feels like a pipedream.
A foolhardy one.
Because things go wrong. And things can’t go right forever.
The problem is once you’ve felt them go wrong, it’s harder to imagine it not being the default.
Maybe I’ve been thrown into the fire too long and emerged harder, cynical. Maybe I’ve settled myself among the embers.
Maybe a lot of us have.
But right now, my mind keeps going back to the people who got on that plane, perhaps without a single worry they wouldn’t get where they were going.
Is that better than worrying about it first?
Maybe. The worry only changes things if you change things because of it, and that’s not always the answer either.
Anyway, I leave you today with that thorny mess. Have a great Thursday, nonetheless.
A Bit to Read 
Leave a comment