Attitude Indicator
"It's not that I have a bad attitude …"

Airplane instrument panels feature an Attitude Indicator or Artificial Horizon, which cleverly shows an aircraft's orientation to the earth's horizon. You can imagine that in three dimensional space, level might easily become an ambiguous concept, leaving a pilot disoriented when, for instance, flying through cloud or over unlevel ground. The Attitude Indicator employs a gyroscope, which works off the Earth's gravity to resist changes in pitch or roll, and comes calibrated to report deviations in degrees. Flying by visual cues alone might encourage a pilot to steer the plane along an apparently level path when actually gaining or losing altitude, or along a visually correct course when actually veering right or left from a desired heading. The Attitude Indicator aids in better orienting the pilot in space.

Similarly, people seem to maintain an Attitude Indicator of our own, in the form of our innate anticipatory sense. We do not simply process input from our five senses, but project forward in continual anticipation of upcoming events, too, feeding our so-called EventHorizon. As a child, I maintained a keen sense of how many days remained before Christmas and also my birthday, perhaps to ensure that neither snuck up on me so that I could at least pretend to be just as good as I could possibly be in the immediately preceding days. When we lived just outside of Washington, DC, I never once attended any dinner party where a prominent conversation topic did not include a sharing of how many work quarters people had remaining until retirement. Some had honed their anticipation into counting days. On Monday, many people reset their internal EventHorizon to Friday, then start counting down. Friday evening, the old EventHorizon resets to count down toward Monday. I maintain many EventHorizons, usually seamlessly. Plan a trip, and the usual EventHorizons might get disrupted, leaving me feeling disoriented, like when I'm gone on Garbage Day. Something seems to be missing then.

I learned when I was managing projects just how sticky and resistant to change EventHorizons can become. A project falling behind schedule might first report that it had slipped by two weeks. Six weeks later, the slippage would still be widely agreed to be about two weeks. Once an EventHorizon gets fixed, it seems almost permanent. I remain steadfastly uncertain how human Attitude Indicators work, but I've grown to appreciate just how dynamic they're not. The old adage insisting that expectations should be set with great care probably draws from this understanding. Once set, an EventHorizon seems to strongly resist even obvious cues that it needs resetting. That two week EventHorizon might well service for months and months after the originally anticipated point.

The pandemic and its associated Stay At Home Order has disrupted more than the usual weekly routine. I've noticed some of my more subtle EventHorizons disrupted. When I first learned that The Muse had been ordered to quarantine at home following her trip to the Northwest, I set my internal EventHorizon accordingly. Today will be the fourteenth day of that quarantine with no evidence that any of us have been infected, but last week, The Lab issued its own work from home order, closing its campus for "the foreseeable future," which means they don't know for how long. The Governor jumped in with a state-wide stay home directive, it, too, with no EventHorizon attached. EventHorizons despise foreseeable future directives because there's no way to calibrate anticipation without something more certain. Last week, I'd reset my internal EventHorizon to expect the isolation to end by the first of May. Yesterday, the last of March, I begrudgingly acknowledged that it's much more likely to stretch into June, though vestiges of that initial two week expectation still remain. Two months seems interminable in comparison.

WhatNow? I feel enjoined from anticipating, not so much locked down today, but locked down a month and more from now. Without a credible artificial horizon, I feel deeply and increasingly, utterly lost in space and time. I'm clearly neither coming nor going, fogbound though presumably still airborne and moving forward without knowing my pitch or my roll. (Hardly a Merrily We Roll Along moment.) Of all the commands an aircraft controller might give, no pilot can comply with even a heartfelt, "Just hold it right there for a second." command. Forward flow continues though perhaps temporarily blinded. That sinking feeling I've been experiencing through the lockdown might come from my internal Attitude Indicator sensing a sudden change in pitch. I'm not exactly flying blind, but I feel increasingly uncertain just where I might land or if there's even an end to this experience without my trusty old EventHorizon guiding my judgement. It's not that I have a bad attitude, but that my Attitude Indicator's not working just now.

©2020 by David A. Schmaltz - all rights reserved

Tags: #WhatNow?, #PureSchmaltz