Initial Reactions

The downside of intuition

Have you ever witnessed something you can’t really shake? Something with an elevated sense of senselessness that makes you wonder what kind of world we are living in. The mind has a strange way of morphing the sad into horror, and reductionist bias into truths.

While driving in the mountains of Colorado, we saw a car in the distance cross our lane and pull into a turnout on our side of the highway. A woman jumped out of the car and headed toward the road. As we passed her, we spotted a hawk in the far lane. It was walking around and didn’t seem injured. Perhaps the woman was going back to shoo it away from the potential harm.

We will call this a pre-incident shot.

At that moment, a truck passed us going the opposite direction. In our mirrors, we saw it hit the hawk on a straight, dead shot with no braking evident. But, the hawk was clearly visible!

Abject horror was our initial response. WTF! We sat in shocked silence for quite a while.

As days passed, we wondered if our initial reaction was the right one. Was this an act of cruelty? What really happened? Maybe our sense of timing was longer than reality. Was the driver distracted or distraught? Was hitting the hawk his only option to avoid swerving and hitting another car? Was our reality, based on our assumptions and biases, accurate? We don’t know. We really don’t.

Over the past four+ years of van travel, we’ve consistently faced the distortions that come from facing the unknown. Initially, it was about sleeping in the van: Will the heater keep running through a frigid night? Will someone tap on our window in the middle of the night? Will this bed structure that we created hold up? The mind asks these questions, especially at night.

A peak inside Dwight

Most likely, our worst-case-scenario ruminations are unwarranted. Each trip we take becomes easier for us which creates a sense of confidence and bravery.

So…we might go more remote, or we go less remote (which creates its own challenges). We go for weeks on end, and then months. We get studded tires and air compressors and traction boards because we might actually need them.

And this has led us to mainland Mexico. We are staying safe and finding our path through a unique culture, history and landscape. If all goes well, we’ll make it all the way to the Yucatan and maybe Belize.

The border crossing at Eagle Pass, TX

We thought about doing this trip during the “sell it all” phase of our life. Our feelings, or more specifically, fears, seem directly correlated to the most recent person we’ve spoken to about our proposed adventure.

We find that those closest to us are most excited. We realize that some of them harbor underlying hesitation, some well founded, others placed there by media. Most are just curious.

Then there are others whom we really don’t know at all who shared the most polar views. We’ve been told that we’ll be killed and to not go…and we’ve been told we’ll never return because we’ll have such a blast. Um, ok but you don’t even know us. Yet these interactions still have an effect on our psyche.

Right now, we’re in San Luis Potosí. It’s a beautiful state in central east Mexico where milky blue rivers and waterfalls cut through valleys of sugarcane.

Cascadas El Salto

We’re camped next to a sugarcane field where person after person walks by our van with a cell phone in one hand and a machete in the other. Oftentimes, they’re carrying a bag over their shoulders. The mind will quickly run through the ways to deal with the threat of a person carrying a machete. But once you’ve seen old men, young girls, and everyone in between, all doing the same thing, you sense that their reasons for brandishing a long blade are quite benign.

One of our spots in San Luis Potosí

The reality is that most of the time, our biases and fears are a gateway to a doom loop that serves little purpose. Our brain is running really old software.

The hawk died, it’s awful. We don’t really know why and don’t need to attribute malice to something that may not exist. Likewise, the machete is…just a tool. But our brain didn’t see it that way until just recently.

Thanks to exposure, an open mind, and a willingness to question our ingrained assumptions about places, about people and about our own preconceived perceptions of both, we can see more clearly in moments that need not invoke fear. We can overcome our knee jerk intuitions and listen for a more accurate truth.