Spinning Yarns

I re-read Robert Heinlein’s Time Enough for Love recently, and some conversations I’ve had this week made the following quotation stick in my mind. It seems to be especially appropriate advice:

Do not confuse “duty” with what other people expect of you; they are utterly different. Duty is a debt you owe to yourself to fulfill obligations you have assumed voluntarily. Paying that debt can entail anything from years of patient work to instant willingness to die. Difficult it may be, but the reward is self-respect.

But there is no reward at all for doing what other people expect of you, and to do so is not merely difficult, but impossible. It is easier to deal with a footpad than it is with the leech who wants “just a few minutes of your time, please — this won’t take long.” Time is your total capital, and the minutes of your life are painfully few. If you allow yourself to fall into the vice of agreeing to such requests, they quickly snowball to the point where these parasites will use up 100 percent of your time — and squawk for more!

So learn to say “No” — and to be rude about it when necessary. Otherwise you will not have time to carry out your duty, or to do your own work, and certainly no time for love and happiness. The termites will nibble away your life and leave none of it for you. (This rule does not mean that you must not do a favor for a friend, or even a stranger. But let the choice be yours. Don’t do it because it is “expected” of you.)

A good objective lesson in this principle occurs when you drive on large multi-lane divided highways (what west-coast Americans think of as “freeways.”) A driver in the rightmost lane has to contend with traffic entering the highway via on-ramps, which necessitates both additional caution and reduction of speed. To avoid these heinous maladies, a right-lane driver who sees a car attempting to merge will typically execute a quick lane-change to the left. In doing so, she avoids a mild sort of inconvenience to herself. At the same time, she has handed a similar inconvenience to the driver in the next lane, who, if he has the option, will typically make the same sort of leftward-shifting manoeuver to avoid it.

This process continues, mutatis mutandis, until the driver in the leftmost lane is handed a large package of irritation, usually in the form of a hulking black SUV driven by a suburban attorney yacking on his cell phone and weaving back and forth over the lane-markers.

Pushing off our problems by lane-changing is a normal part of life, but it really sucks to be the poor sap who gets stuck with the cheque in the leftmost lane. After all, he was driving over there because he’d planned ahead, and didn’t all our primary-school teachers tell us that planning ahead is the key to a happy and successful life? Well, perhaps not in this case. We could get all noble about it, and say that one shouldn’t solve problems by lane-changing, but it’s not obvious to me that we can always avoid it, even with the best of intentions.

On the other hand, if you do try to change lanes, and there turns out not to be any room for you, don’t expect the rest of the world to accommodate you by taking responsibility for your problems.

Filed by Michael at 11:39 under Diatribe, Social
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