“NOPE,” said the handyman. “It won’t work.” I’d asked him to put black and white floor tiles on a wall. He insisted that they would come tumbling down. Later, I thought it over, decided there was no good reason why the tiles should come down, and put them up myself.
I thought of the incident the day my sister called me up, literally in tears. The head of the day-care centre where she takes her little boy had said, “If you were handling this child correctly, he wouldn’t cry when you leave him.”
“Nonsense,” I said. “He’s a fine, secure baby and you know it.”
“But she has a masters degree in child psychology,” my sister said, crying. “She must know.”
“Just because somebody’s an expert doesn’t mean they are always right,” I said. I told her of an incident that had happened to an editor I know.
One cold morning in Murree, the ‘hot’ light of his car turned on by itself. He quickly stopped at a garage. “Don’t worry about it,” the mechanic assured him. “The light will go off as soon as the car warms up.” The owner knew his car and said the light had never lighted up on any other cold morning — but the expert told him that it was okay so he drove on. It turned out that the radiator was frozen. He almost ruined the car. “It served me right,” he told me. “I had listened to someone who was supposed to know instead of paying attention to my own sense of the situation.” I said to my sister, “And that’s what you are doing with your son.” I was scolding, but I was sympathetic, too.
The world has become more complicated since we’ve lost confidence in our ability to understand and deal with it. But common sense is as useful now as it ever was. No amount of experience substitutes for an intimate knowledge of a person or a situation. At times, you just have to trust your own judgment. It almost cost me my life to learn that. I was reading a book one day, idly scratching the back of my head, when I noticed that in one particular spot, the scratching echoed in my head like fingernails on an empty cardboard carton. I rushed off to see my doctor. “Got a hole in your head, have you?” he teased. “It’s nothing — just one of those scalp nerves sounding off.”
Two years and four doctors later, I was still being told it was nothing. To the fifth doctor, I said, almost in desperation, “But I live in this body, I know something’s different.”
“If you won’t take my word for it, I’ll take an x-ray and prove it to you,” he said. Well, there it was, of course, the tumour that had made a hole as big as an eye socket in the back of my skull. After the operation, a young resident paused by my bed. “It’s a good thing you’re so smart,” he said. “Most patients die of these tumours because we don’t know they are there until it is too late.”
Experts always sound so sure. Nerville Chamberlain, the British Prime Minister, was positive just before the start of World War II that there would be “peace for our time.” Producer Irving Thalberg did not hesitate to advise Louis B. Mayer against buying the rights of Gone with the Wind because “no Civil War picture ever made a nickel!” Even Abraham Lincoln surely believed it when he said in his Gettysburg Address: “The world will little note, nor long remember, what we say here....”
We should not, therefore, be intimidated by experts. When it’s an area we really know about — our bodies, families, house — let’s listen to what the experts have to say, then make up our own minds. Our guess is probably as good as theirs — and sometimes a whole lot better, as I can say by just looking at my black-and-white tile wall. Eight years later, it is still standing and it still looks great.
“NOPE,” said the handyman. “It won’t work.” I’d asked him to put black and white floor tiles on a wall. He insisted that they would come tumbling down. Later, I thought it over, decided there was no good reason why the tiles should come down, and put them up myself.
