Recently I went out for dinner with my boyfriend, G. It was a regular ol’ Saturday night, no special occasion, but we were stuck behind a car that was going particularly slow. Now, Pittsburgh is within a county that has the second-oldest population in the country (Dade County in Florida is number one), so we’re often stuck behind slooow-moving vehicles. Yet what struck me was what was said:
“I hope we don’t move that slow when we’re elderly,” I said, frustrated.
“The reason they probably get to be elderly is they’re the careful types to begin with,” he replied.
Being a medical student, I never thought of it that way. I was thinking aging -> physiology -> slowed reflexes, almost on autopilot. And yet he may be right.
How many situations do we “think” about without ever really considering a different angle? According to Dr. Dean Buonomann, Ph.D., a professor of neurobiology and the author of Brain Bugs: How the Brain’s Flaws Change Our Lives, our brains maintain thousands of nonsensical fears and delusions because we’re running on a 100,000 year-old operating system. Consider this: The odds of being killed by a stranger are a full ten times higher than being killed by a car. Yet the news media, TV shows, and movies are flooded with gory murder images and sensationalist plots centered around murder almost 100 times more than reports of car accidents.
Doing one thing different can also free us from the mundane and ordinary and propel us into creativity and innovation, or at the very least, a little bit of fun. So dare to take a different route home from work. Go on a date night on a Tuesday. Hang out with people who think differently than you do (my boyfriend, for instance, was a graduate student in physics). Remember: Problems can’t be solved in the same line of thinking in which they are created. It’s best to have some adventure, switch things up, and get out of the rut before you start to feel it. So long as what you’re doing is safe, legal, and moral, I say, go for it. There’s a life meant to be lived and claimed as your own.
Photo source: Be Different, a photo by Murat KARAKAŞ on Flickr.
Hey, just wanted to let you know that the site isn’t working right in Chrome. The background for the main text of the posts is the wood, so it is hard to read. Just a friendly heads up…I’ve had this happen to me with my own blog.