Any layperson who has sat at the hospital bed side of someone wired up to machines will know the anxiety of watching numbers without enough expertise to know what to ignore. The heart rate seems to be dropping – what if it doesn’t stop? Why has breathing sped up?
After a few hours, you come to understand that “beats per minute” is an average and variability is normal, that you should wait and see before reacting and most apparent abnormalities will correct themselves before anyone who knows what they’re doing becomes concerned. The data is useful only for people who know what to do with it.
I discovered recently that the same applies to tracking a flight.
One of my sons, returning home after wild adventures near a contested border and a somewhat hair-raising journey to the airport, boarded a flight that was then repeatedly delayed because the plane kept freezing again before they could get it off the ground.
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I am not a nervous flyer. I dislike being cramped, trapped and breathing recycled air, but I don’t worry much about the thing falling out of the sky for the same reason I don’t worry much about nuclear war.
There is nothing I can do to prevent or control it, and a reasonable probability that my own suffering would be very brief. I’m much more anxious on Irish roads, where the likelihood of continuing pain is higher and there’s a chance that sufficient vigilance on my part will avert disaster.
But it turns out that, as often, I’m less relaxed about my beloved people’s exposure to risk than my own. I started tracking my son’s flight when he turned off his phone for take-off, because I wanted to know that this time he was really airborne and homebound, and then I thought it would be interesting to see his progress over countries I’d never visited and landscapes I liked to imagine.
I was wrong. It was late at night, and the stories of his travels I’d been hearing were not the sort to promote a mother’s peace of mind. As the plane gained altitude and the tracker zoomed out, I could see other planes, nearer than I approved to the one bearing my child. And then, after a smooth ascent, his plane lost altitude, not much but faster than I liked. And then regained it, so that was all right, probably just turbulence, but then it happened again and then the plane started to turn, apparently even further away from Ireland, so I went on watching until it was back on the course that seemed right to me. (I know nothing at all about aviation or air traffic control, and when I’m the one on a plane that seems to be heading in the wrong direction I’m just intrigued, or at worst irritated because I want to get off as soon as possible.)
[ There are happier and healthier countries than Ireland, but most aren’tOpens in new window ]
It didn’t take me long to see that I was causing myself needless and pointless agitation. Even if my fears had been realised, watching in real time was hardly going to help. Bad news travels fast enough, quite apart from the fact that my son was crossing well-regulated airspace on an EU-registered carrier and there was no possible reason to expect anything worse than a shortage of taxis at the airport. I read for a while, slept a bit, woke to an admirably quiet closing of the front door followed by a text that said “safe home, all well”, words to gladden any parent’s heart.
Regular readers will know my deep aversion to the quantified, gamified life. Of course healthcare workers should have ready access to data that gives early warning signs of a patient’s deterioration, and I am wholeheartedly in favour of the computer/human flying the plane knowing exactly how far it is to the ground, the destination, that other plane over there and whatever else promotes safety. But in most situations, data promotes safety only when someone knows what to do about it. The rest of us, mostly, can look at our person rather than the screen, at the stars or the clouds or the sea below rather than the altimeter. Someone else’s expertise frees us to be human, relational, to pay attention to what can’t be counted.
I do not think ignorance is ever true bliss, because there is no goodness or safety in wilful narrow-mindedness and fearful avoidance. But sometimes agnosticism – the embrace of not-knowing – is freedom.
