Independence Day
For reasons known only to God and my client, I found myself driving from southern Massachusetts up to New Hampshire during rush hour on July 3rd. Now I suppose can’t get too upset at having been forced onto the road that day; after all, I was certainly in good company.
If you’re unfamiliar with New England summer vacation theory, let me just say that this is probably the second worst route of traffic on the first worst travel day of the year. The only less desirable option would have been taking the opposite route; that is traveling from North of Boston to Cape Cod. This is not because the Cape is that much more popular than Maine, but rather it is because the good people of Bourne insist on maintaining a rotary for their little town that lies in the middle of the only road to the Cape. This particular roundabout can back up traffic for 6 to 10 hours as people circle around the Irving station and the McDonalds on their way to the cranberry bogs. Fuck You Bourne. But I digress.
There are three generally accepted ways to get from points south of Boston to NH. You can take Interstate 495, which goes way around the city and through the outermost suburbs. Or, your second option would be to take Interstate 95, which just kind of skirts the city through towns like Waltham and Burlington. Or, if you don’t like the first two choices, you can take 95 to 93 to 1 to 95; which goes right smack through the middle of bean town.
Many people still consider 495 to be the safe route in this situation, the logic being that the further away from Boston you get, the lighter the traffic will become. Thus, although you’ll be driving for a longer distance overall, your time will be shorter since you’ll avoid traffic jams. This is a good theory, but I’ve rarely been on 495 without seeing some sort of tie up or other, so it typically ends up being both longer and slower.
Studying a map, 95 appears easiest route. It draws a reasonably straight line from north to south, curving only to avoid the center of Boston, and as an added benefit there’s no need to change routes along your way (if you’re one who finds that sort of thing confusing) from Providence to Augusta. The down side to 95 is that, since it is generally regarded as the easiest route, it is therefore the road most taken and can get pretty crowded sometimes.
The third route, 95 to 93 to 1 to 95 is the shortest one mileage-wise. This seems immediately attractive, but owing to the fact that it runs right through the center of Boston it is typically the slowest way (especially at rush hour when I happened to be on the road), since you need to share space with the quarter of a million other cars that access this stretch of asphalt on any given weekday. In short, there is no obvious way to get from south of Boston up to New Hampshire. Each choice has its own set of risks and challenges.
Decisions, decisions. As Americans we are taught to value the ability to make our own choices in life. At any given fork in the road, we have an opportunity to exercise freewill. Freewill allows an American to decide what to do, where to live, who to associate with, and exactly how to do all of that. We learn quickly that the choices we make will shape who we are.
Freewill means that I can sit here and write this ranting, or I can go to my living room and watch an episode of Law and Order. No one is going to come into my house and take away my ability to watch Law and Order just because I failed to write about driving on Fourth of July weekend. Now of course, if all I did all day long was watch TV, it wouldn’t take long for my creditors to catch up to me and pretty soon, I’d be making a different set of choices (such as whether to share the top bunk in my cell with a guy named Bruce, or to share the bottom bunk in my cell with a guy named Bruce); but again, I digress. As long as we are choosing to live within the rules of society, which are really not that complicated, we will always have choices.
Making decisions is hard. It can be crippling for some people. If you learn that making the right choice can lead to pleasure, then you must also understand the corollary that making the wrong choice can lead to pain. Regrets of the road not taken so to speak. For example, if my wife and I go to the movies on Saturday night, should we see a horror film, which I’ll enjoy until we get home and I’m woken up every ten minutes so I can check for monsters under the bed? Or should we see a foreign film I’ll hate about a rich guy who falls in love with a poor girl and, after a series of difficulties, get married and live happily ever after?
It’s a tough choice. The horror film gives me instant gratification but delayed pain, while experience has proven that taking the other option is painful in the short term, bed time is much more enjoyable when we see the foreign film. Honestly, on any given Saturday night I could choose to see either movie and then have to regret either time spent in the theater or time spent in bed.
And there’s no getting around the choice making either. As 1980s superstar Geddy Lee would remind us all, “if you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice”. That is, deciding to ignore the choice altogether, is still a form of decision making. Let me illustrate. I seem to get a new business plan forwarded to me every couple of weeks. Usually I skim through them, as I’m always interested in what people are betting their own lives on, but only rarely do I invest my own money.
This has to do with my own tolerance for risk as part of an overall investment strategy more than anything that I have read or not read in the “business plan du jour”, but still, deciding not to invest in a risky business, is gut wrenching at times. The problem here is that strictly given the volume of plans I seem to go through, it’s a statistical probability that one or two of the plans that I have passed on have the potential to me a millionaire. This means that, at some point in my life, I’ll need to come to terms with the fact that I could have invested in www.nextbigthing.com at the ground floor, but I chose not to (don’t bother following my hypothetical link, I made it up for literary flow, though as it turns out it is actually a company in real life which sucks).
And really, there’s no escape from this, as Geddy Lee knows, deciding not to even read the plans I receive is essentially making the decision for me. So I content myself to read the plans as an intellectual exercise, secure in the knowledge that I maintain an overall investment strategy that does not allow me to buy into every start-up that comes down the line; even though one of them will likely turn out to be Microsoft 2. This is my choice.
I wonder if life would not be more enjoyable if we only had one movie to see on Saturday night, if there was only one investment strategy to follow, and that if when you wanted to get from Boston to New Hampshire, you went straight on “Boston New Hampshire Rd” until you passed through Boston and arrived in New Hampshire. How freeing it would be to take myself out of the equation. You want a shirt? Here’s your shirt. No need to decide what kind of shirt you would look best in, or where you should get your shirt from, or even when the best time to buy your shirt would be! As you know, these are all decisions that the shirtless must either make or be doomed to shirtlessness forever.. .
But this is not our culture. Americans live knowing that their lives boil down to a series of choices they have made. Granted, we do not all start in the same place. We all have different levels of talent or intellect— and luck, to say the least, can be a worthy foe. But how we use what we start with, whether or not we exercise our talents, and how we react to a swift kick in the back from lady luck are all squarely within our domain of control. It is at the very core of the pursuit of happiness noted in the Declaration of Independence. That is to say; we have the right to seek happiness, as to them seeking happiness was the end in itself. Make good choices, and you can achieve happiness. Make bad ones and you’ll be checking under the bed for monsters for the rest of your life. That’s what they promised us in that brilliant phrase- the opportunity to make our own choices, nothing more, nothing less.
So back to my driving dilemma that fateful weekend. I was going to have to make a choice that, once made, would be the difference in getting home in two hours, or possibly six. Not exactly the kind of decision that is going to haunt me for years to come, but a decision nonetheless. For better or worse, no one was going to tell me the right way to go.
In the end, I divined that only a moron would try to get through the center of Boston during rush hour on Fourth of July weekend. And, as it turned out I was right, it was just me and a handful of morons. I sailed through Boston faster that day than I ever had before, or ever have since. The road was practically empty and I made it home in an hour and a half. If MIT offered a PhDs in driving I’d have received an honorary degree based on that day’s performance.
Making that decision based on such brilliant logic was the best part of that week. I felt a sense of pride that can still remember six months later. This is the hidden value of making your own choices. Sure, I took the risk, I got the reward. But moreover, I went to bed that night feeling just a little smarter than the average moron.
So there it is; a loosely strung together story about being a proud American on Fourth of July weekend. Maybe I should have just watched Law and Order.