Guilty of injustice

Traveling with the constant need to pass judgements leads unavoidably to a certain portion of mistakes. Those with a direct impact in our circumstances can sometimes be reversed or, if not, at least they provide almost instant feedback, which makes for excellent learning opportunities: witnessing the direct (adverse) consequences of our actions helps establishing beyond doubt a cause-effect relationship and provides us with some sense of agency, giving us the chance to prevent future damages by avoiding the causing action in the first place.

But there are flawed judgements that do not change our situation or at least not in a short time span, so it is very difficult to establish a connection between the errors and their consequences. For this kind of mistakes the only possible mitigation is staying alert and revisiting your calls every now and then to see if, when judging in a different situation, your decision might be another. I do not mean to say that this is easy, as it takes a lot of mental energy and certain amount of time, but it is our only option to improve the overall "quality" of our opinions.

Photo: Michael Coghlan

A few weeks ago a friend of mine was venting his frustration because his wife had started to complain of discomfort and even pain when they had sex. This had not been an issue for many years but suddenly (probably linked to getting on years) if he let himself go unrestrained she would suffer the consequences. He reassured me that he was engaged but not violent, and that he certainly had no interest on inflicting pain, but I still dismissed his complaint as being selfish: if he really cared about his wife it would not bother him to be gentler than usual, even if that meant a lower level of pleasure. He replied that his care for his wife was what caused the frustration, because he definitely did not want to hurt her, but she did not like "walking on eggshells" around her. Especially since this had never been necessary before.

Even if I was quite confident of my opinion at the time, I made a mental note to think about in more depth, because I did not have the time back then and I feared I was being too harsh on my friend. That lead me down the rabbit hole of other situations where restraint is possible but generally not desirable (or at least severely undercuts that point of the activity). One typical example of this intentional lack (or limit) of restraint is eating crabs in certain venues: you purposefully get a bib so that you do not have to be too cautious while eating and can instead focus on enjoying the meal without the fear to get your shirt dirty. It is certainly possible to eat crabs without the bib, but the attention you have to devote to the careful handling of the food detracts from the enjoyment. And it is not like you need to eat like a barbarian, using brutal manners, it is just a matter of not having to worry. The same applies to any use of protective gear, from mountain biking to skateboarding: they take some of your worries away from your mind and lets you focus on whatever you are doing.

There are two first-hand examples that I want to share with you. The first one is setting up an alarm clock to wake up on time in the morning. It is just a safety that allows you to just sleep instead of wondering all night long whether it is already time to get up. In fact, in particularly important situations (the night before an early flight or a crucial meeting) the fear that the alarm clock might malfunction often keeps me awake. The second case is sharing the bed with Karen: at home have a joint structure holding two mattresses and two duvets, so we sleep together but we do not actually have to share the bed, because each one has their own. However, when we are in a hotel room or, particularly, when we are visiting her mother, we sleep in a single (rather narrow) mattress with one sheet and one blanket, and that means that I spend my nights trying no to push her out of the bed or hoarding the blanket. Of course I want to sleep, but it is more important for me not to disturb her than actually sleeping soundly. That is the reason while I definitely prefer sleeping on our twin mattresses. Do you start to see the parallelism with my friend's sex problem?

Once I realized the similarities I just rushed to apologize to him. It is clear that he is a nice and caring person, and a loving husband, and I am sure that they will find a way to overcome together their current difficulties. On my side, I have just confirmed my own ability to reach hasty conclusions and the need to keep re-evaluating them to catch the most flagrant errors. And it is also very reassuring to see that people I learned to love are still as worth of my appreciation as they used to be. Have a nice weekend.