EPTI put my pencil down, peeled off my headphones, and took a vertiginous little swing from panic, a quick sharp twist of the gut, to dumb, blinking surprise. And I knew almost instantly what had happened.
A month or so back I had looked up all the times for my final exams while booking flights to and from Palm Springs for spring break. I'd gone straight to the university registrar's table of final exam times and dutifully written down that my physics class, being a class held at 10:00 am MWF, would have its final on Thursday of final week at 8:30 am. I wrote that day and time down on a sticky note, as well as the days and times for my three other finals, and a month later took that note to myself, still on my desk albeit tattered here and creased there, as God's own truth. I never once thought that my physics class had an alternate lecture time as well, that it might have a different final exam time as a result. I never read "Final Exam Logistics" announcement posted on Piazza a few weeks before the exam--and why should I? It's all right here in this note on my desk.
And so, last night, halfway through relearning this quarter's material, I closed my textbook, sat back in my chair, and wondered, despite knowing, how this had happened.
Because the consequences of all of this will invariably be quite small. I go to one of those universities that are rapidly becoming the primary reproductive organs of the upper middle class. Truly bad things aren't allowed to happen. Even outright failures will vanish from your transcript almost without a trace if you can manage a passing grade the second time round. At the end of the day, it's a single class, an ancillary requirement for all engineers, and at the end of the day it's a single line on a transcript that more than likely no one will ever read.
No, what interested me then and continues to interest me now is just how easily a few small errors and patterns of behavior slotted together, harmonized, and quite suddenly become a genuine problem. A misread exam schedule, a failure of memory, too much faith in a single note on a desk, and an absent dash of care.
The world to me seems more fragile, more attenuated than we, caught in the monotone tide of our days, often realize. We seem, on closer inspection, a few frayed threads from catastrophe more often than not, and that we get on at all is more than a little wonderful.
We speak of straws breaking the backs of camels, of sparks that while they may be the proximate cause of some major event or other hardly constitute the whole network of interactions, largely incomprehensible to us, which constitutes the real anatomy of a disaster. We speak of dominoes toppling, and of perfect storms.
We know this to be true--that the sum of all the gathered tension in the interlaced strands of effect and cause that compose our worlds can sheer suddenly through our lives, our communities, our nations; that all the interactions between one event and another are that we can wake and find ourselves blinking in the sun in late June, 1914.
I speak of personal missteps and one of the greatest political tragedies of the modern world as if they were commensurate in the nature of their causes and the extent of their prior unknowability, and to a reasonable extent that comparison is, of course, ridiculous. But while the difference in the magnitude of both the small events building toward their effect and also their unpredictability may be wide, they are remarkably alike in their if not singularity then rarity: we skirt near-daily along disaster’s curb, but falter less frequently than it seems we’ve any right to.
We’ve, to an extent, our own selves to thank for that: through some hodgepodge of organization, social mores, self-direct care, and simple human decency we manage, mostly, to wear the sharpest of the edges of the world down, or wrap them in gauze, and get on with the business of living. How much is care and how much grace or luck seems impossible to gauge, but the regularity with which we get on at all seems just the sort of minor, daily miracle in the face of which the only decent response is to toss my pen across the patio, crack another bottle of Anchor, and spend the afternoon watching the sun push its way through this too-still southern sky, feel its heat work like rollers up and down my skin while the evening shadows saunter out from the mountains’ skirts.
