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We are not doing what comes naturally

By Herbert Goldstone

Driving home from a friend’s house the other evening, the thought hit me. Where on Earth did a human being, this hairy two-legged animal who climbed down out of the trees only a short time ago, geologically speaking, ever learn how to control as intricate and complicated a piece of machinery as a modern automobile?

Mother Nature certainly never gave him—or her, to be politically correct—that kind of know-how. Drive a car? She had to teach this Homo Sapien character how to survive in those early days of human existence—how to protect himself from predators like the sabre tooth tiger, how to dig up enough roots from the ground for a square meal once in a while and how to fight off that tribe over in the next cave.

She gave him a few basic lessons: let him discover fire and use it to cook that raw animal he just killed or to keep from freezing in the winter. Why waste his time and tax his simple brain with how to handle a four-door sedan in a sudden skid on an icy road? He had to pick that up along the way somewhere.

I was thinking about it while I drove, my mind more on the music from the CD I was playing than the steering wheel or headlights or my anti-lock brake system.

I remembered that when I pulled away from the curb near my friend’s Manhattan apartment—yeah, I was lucky enough to find a parking space and not have to pay for a garage, which takes half your bank account these days—I moved the shift lever in the console next to me from PARK to DRIVE without looking at it or even thinking about it. The move has become instinctive, like closing your eyes when you sneeze.

In the same way, instinctively, you hit the accelerator when the light turns from red to green or the brake pedal when it switches to yellow at the next intersection.

I’m not talking about the highway cowboys who think a red light is the signal to speed up and try to beat it or who don’t slow down until their front bumper is an inch from your rear bumper and who tailgate everyone on the road. I’m talking about good, safe drivers, which I try to be. Okay, I admit I blow it once in a while, but basically I try not to be a menace on the road, to myself or the other drivers on the road.

Driving has become ingrained in human beings. Red light means stop, green means start moving again and you don’t have to pull over and check it out in your driver’s manual. When you want to slow down or stop, the right foot goes down on that pedal automatically. Unless you’re a raw beginner, you don’t have to stop and figure out what you’re doing.

It’s not just driving a car that we learn how to do automatically. How about flying? I don’t mean balloons, which came into being back in the 1700s some time. I mean handling the wonderful flying machines that came along after the Wright brothers got this crazy idea of a putting together a thing with a motor, a couple of wooden propellers and a pair of cloth covered wings, then actually getting off the ground for a few yards at Kitty Hawk, NC, in 1903.

Do you have any idea how many thousands of men and women have learned how to fly airplanes of all sizes in the years since then? Yes, there have been lots of disasters, crashes and collisions, not to mention planes shot down in wartime dog fights, but flying has become another impossible automatic skill humans have acquired. Commercial aviation developed to the point where air travel became safer than riding in your own car.

At least it was until last Sept. 11.

I never had a chance to fly a plane and I know I’d be far too nervous to ever take the controls, but I understand how planes work. Get them going fast enough and the shape of the wings creates lift when the wind passes over them.

Pilots don’t even think about that. They just fly.

Folks ride bicycles the same way, instinctively. Once you get the knack, you don’t worry about how to keep your balance. You just do it.

The same with sailing a boat. Once you learn, and it’s a lot of exciting fun, it too comes naturally.

Sports? Plenty of automatic skill there too that didn’t come naturally, except maybe way back when Mister Cave Man tossed a rock at some animal or one of his neighbors.

Ever watch a major league baseball player go after a ground ball or chase a long fly? That’s a skill that Mother Nature never bothered to teach mankind. It’s just that once old Abner Doubleday got the ball rolling, lots of folks got to like the game. Every kid I ever knew learned some skill at it, natural or not.

Golf? Never mind the average Sunday duffer like me. There’s been Tiger Woods and Ben Hogan and Bobby Jones and all those wizards who work magic with a set of clubs and a little white ball on the ground or a wooden tee.

Swimming? I don’t know how natural it is, but lots of us enjoy it and get pretty good at it. I’ve gotten a bit old for running and jumping or throwing any kind of ball, but I still do a pretty skillful few laps in a swimming pool, outdoor or indoor.

Speaking of pool, the kind you play on a table with 15 colored balls and one white one is a great game. It takes a lot of learning to acquire the skill but I’m fair at it after playing a lot of it since I was a kid. Whether Mother Nature taught me or not, you get to know, once again almost by instinct, which ball is going to roll where when you hit the cue ball with that long polished stick with the green felt tip.

sI feel sort of sorry for the old cave man. Struggling to stay alive, he never knew all the fun he was missing.