I am standing in front of an intimidating audience and a question stops me. I should know how to answer. I do know the answer. But its not coming to me right away. So the question has me stopped.

There is a silence. And at the center of that silence stands me waiting for the answer to come. At first. But the silence is piling up, and as it does I start to make alternative plans. Up to this point I was just hanging passively as some automatic mechanism searches through the files for the right thread, but now I may have to start actively conjuring something up.

The last thing you want to do is waste precious moments deciding when to cut off that search, especially because as soon as those thoughts start to creep in they threaten to be a self-fulfilling prophecy.

But I can’t not think about it. Because no matter how confident I am that I do have the answer stored in there somewhere there is always a chance that memory fails and as long I stand here, the answer is still not going to come to me. And the longer I wait the less time I am going to have to stammer out something forced. All the while the audience is growing uncomfortable.

This is more than just an optimal stopping problem because of the Zen state variable. Its the Zen fixed point. The more confident you are that the answer will come, the less you will be infiltrated by thoughts of the eventual collapse, the more likely your confidence will be validated. And then there’s what happens when that doesn’t happen.

And then there’s what happens when you know all of the above and it either fuels your confidence (because you are the confident type) or sends you even sooner spiraling into a panic searching for plan B, crowding out plan Absent, all the while escalating the panic (because you are prone to panic) ensuring that whatever finally does come out is going to be a big mess.

Chickle: Type-A Meditation from www.f1me.net