Learning to
act right (47)… Repetition revisited… a comforting failure??
Torrey OrtonJan. 27, 2015
Learning to park,
again
For five months
I’ve been learning to park again! That’s on the back of 55 years’ experience on
three continents in two modalities (left and right), and 5 months of rear video
and audio assist. The new car was measured for fit with our off-street parking
space, passing by about four inches greater width than its predecessor. Length
about equal. The space in question is like an on-street parking space, but
behind an automatic sliding gate parallel to the street and about 1 car’s width
wide by two cars’ lengths long.
It’s that four inches
I’ve been learning to command with quite intermittent success. Here’s the
achievement standard: when I get the angle of entry correct and the closeness
of passage bearably delicate (i.e. – failure to rub off door panel paint on the
driver’s side gate post and front fender paint on its opposite number) a best
of class single-go entry to the parking space with no back and fill moves will
result. This I have managed about five times in these five months. The rest
(almost one go a day) have been variations on two or three back-and-fills to be
able to close the gate with me and the car inside it.
…but I’m not getting it right
Now I might have
thought I would get this right, since I’ve always been a high performance
parker, till now. And this is why I’m writing. I’m not getting it right but by
chance almost. I’m not finding the right path and then repeating it, I’m just
repeating the looking for it! Weird.
Why not trial and
error the path, as any sensible person including me does when learning
something new? Why not notice the front and rear markers for the right place to
start the approach to the gate? Why not notice the point at which the turn to
enter the gate has to begin to optimise the entry space for backing in?
I don’t know why
not for all these except that I started trying to park here with the assumption
that I would progressively get it right and that would include the implicit
signals for the required moves. This assumption, in turn, involves an implicit
assumption that the learning will occur without trying, so to speak, which is
often enough true when an action has to be repeated, whether we learn it or
not. This is not, therefore, a short term memory problem, which I have plenty
of and reliably expect. For them there is a treatment: conscious repetition of
the prospective memory item by doing it over a couple of times, or even better
by writing it in the pocket notepad I always carry for such events.
This is a mistaken
assumption problem supercharged by my resistance to the facts above – namely I
keep getting it wrong way above what normal evidence-based practice should
allow. I could say I’m enjoying the potluck approach I’m taking and the
evidence for that is I don’t get irritated about messing it up. And so, I could
say I should get irritated and there’s something wrong with me that I don’t.
But I’m not irritated and any reader of my blog posts can tell when I’m
irritated about something.
A comforting failure??
Maybe there’s
something comforting in the repetition of my approach, which is wrong about 90%
of the time on the above numbers? The comfort being the promise of a small
challenge which has a high failure rate and low salience. Much less than an
expected change of street lights when I’m close to the end of a cycle on a
normal progress on a normal street. At those I get a small charge of
disappointment that the fates of timing have corralled me again.
Not so the pathway
to the safety of my home. I can say now that maybe this is a presence exercise
undertaken without intent, but under the thumb of necessity, as the best are. Evidence
in search of a theory is also a scientific process. Hmmm.
