I was recently talking to a bike trainer about learning to ride a motorbike. One of the things that was discussed was about my understanding of certain safety considerations: “Do I understand the importance of wearing high visibility clothing, do I understand the risks of taking drugs or alcohol when riding, do I understand the need to pay due regard to the varying weather conditions when riding?’ and so on. My answer to a lot of these was not a resounding yes.

Of course I understand on a cognitive level almost all of the questions asked. I could easily answer yes and with fully thought out reasons and explanations that would certainly pass me on any test. Not only am I relatively intelligent, but I’ve two decades of driving experience on which to call upon. 

But we were talking about safety in a practical setting in which I had never found myself, and it was partly my experience as a driver that informed by caution. Because I didn’t feel I could honestly claim to understand in a bodily, subconscious, visceral level. I understood why high visibility clothing was important, but did I understand to the extent that I would never consider riding without it? Of course not. 

This got me thinking, because I consider myself a thinker, an intellectual maybe, a philosopher; certainly someone who prides clear thought out reasoning and critical analysis and gets frustrated when other people seem incapable of doing so.  And yet, most of the big, drastic decisions I’ve made in my life have been spontaneous and very specifically without any clearly thought out process. I went into teaching on a whim, and I equally left the profession in a manner that might be reasonably characterised as blindly jumping ship on to a passing craft I knew nothing about. I didn’t even plan what degree I take, or think carefully through buying my first house (more or less putting an offer on the first house I found, and jumping past many of the cautious checks one normally should do, all because it just got me out of an increasingly toxic rental market). And countless mistakes were made along the way as a result (first year/first winter of that particular house being without any kind of central heating due to the condemned boiler we inherited with the property, for example). 

In a way, this seems to have been how I’ve lived most of my life: by making a continual series of mistakes that I’ve had the good fortune to survive and learn from. In the first six months of driving, I nearly had what I can only assume would have been a fatal crash when I agreed to race a friend of mine down the road. I’ve never done anything so foolish since. In the biking questions, I did in fact answer absolutely in the affirmative on the matter of drinking, but that understanding probably only resulted from the time that I ended up driving a good 200 miles in the fog while way over the limit after being too polite to turn down the restaurant owner who was plying us all with shots of limoncello to celebrate his birthday. Prior to that event, it is not that I would ever deliberately drive while over the limit, but I might always have been convinced by the idea that ‘one more drink’ wouldn’t hurt. 

Equally, in work, it was finding myself in the absolutely untenable position of working in an environment where the management and the workplace were so poorly coordinated themselves that they were utterly incapable of supporting me, or making provision to ensure my mental and physical safety; and that was all down to my naive trust that they had reasonable systems in place, and a genuine willingness and drive to help and support me. I had jumped into the deep end of a pool because people told me that was the best way to learn to swim and I could see all the lifeguards there who I trusted to pull me out if I got into difficulty. Little did I know that there were too few lifeguards, and that those lifeguards had too many other concerns and difficulties to notice me, many of whom were too worried about drowning themselves. But that experience with teaching did at least provide me with a much more nuanced understanding of the structures that need to be in place in the workplace to support workers. I know at a much deeper level that if, for example, an NHS workplace is struggling with numerous capability procedures, there’s a good possibility that cause of that is due to the fact that the NHS itself is underfunded, has a workforce crisis, etc, and that there are many departments that run on the desperate hope that everyone in the team is at the top of their game because there is a terrified awareness that no one has the capacity to cope if they are not. 

As I think about this more, I think this starts to ring true of many aspects of my intellectual life as well. Increasingly, these days, I sit back in debates for a great deal of time, where I can, because I don’t feel qualified to argue until I really feel I’ve reached a deep understanding. I’ll sit on the fence far longer that I necessarily feel that I should, and sometimes feel cowardly for doing so, simply because I need to feel that I know what’s going on at, again, a visceral level before I feel qualified to take a stance. And when I argue, I always seem to end up qualifying my answer, trying to seek the common ground for fear of having missed something crucial.

This also reflects quite strongly with my experience as an actor. I’m actually very good at learning my lines. But I know feel I know my lines until I am performing them. Equally, I don’t really feel that I am acting or at all know what I am doing on stage until I’ve got my script down and am performing without aid. Performance with a script always feels false and forced, the words without the performance feel like disconnected projections into the unknown. 

I don’t know to what extent my experience here reflects the experiences of others. I suspect there are people out there who can enter situations with enough of a theoretical understanding of what is going on to avoid getting themselves into any difficulty. But I know I won’t fully understand the risk that a very wet road poses to a motorbike until I’ve felt the machine losing control beneath me. I won’t feel that I know anything until my confidence has been challenged, and the abyss has threatened to open up beneath me.

The problem is, that feels like a deeply problematic way to live a life, and I suspect there is an element of impatience and rashness in me that has lead to that. Perhaps had I taken more time in my decisions, given more thought to the reasoning behind actions, I could have avoided the pitfalls, and not been forced to learn from my mistakes. This feeling that I am always hurling towards my next crisis is one that does not do a great deal for my anxiety. But then, the alternative, where I am mired with too much thought, too much of a need to consider every possible result of every decision I make, is a handicap I’ve never quite been able to overcome, except with extremes.

So, yes, perhaps I am wiser due to my many mistakes, and maybe am slightly less likely to make them in future. But that does not quite sit comfortably with me when I try to predict what the future might bring.