Great Learning Sometimes Hinders Good Thinking
Consider the peculiar problem with my old '91 S-10. First, I noticed that the radio wouldn't maintain its settings after being turned off. No big deal; just reset the dial to Classical 90.5 each time.
"Did you notice the radio problem?" I queried my son a couple of weeks later. "No, but did you know that if you blow the horn the inside lights come on?" Seldom needing the horn, I hadn't noticed.
So my curious self initiated the methodical troubleshooting techniques honed to razor sharpness in the three-plus decades of engineering experience since my six years of college.
Pressing the horn illuminated the inside lights to about one-third brightness, but like a flitting bee, the horn buzzed languidly. "Could be a bad horn relay," my educated self postulated, attempting to impress my gullible self. "But tell me why the lights come on," my skeptical self retorted. I couldn't.
More fiddling. Pressing the horn also scrambled the radio's display into gibberish yet didn't affect the sound.
"Call the fellow who helped you last time," my practical self advised. I obeyed. "Loose wire," his terse diagnosis, sounded reasonable. So I wiggled and tugged every wire I could lay my fingers on. No success.
Thirty years ago when I relished this sort of challenge, I couldn't have foreseen what I tell you now: my body doesn't bend in the right places anymore.
The confined space requires more-than-reasonable contortion to maneuver one's gray head down between the brake and clutch to peer upward into the wiring. And no amount of squinting produces a clear focus through bifocals at such close range.
And even with a detailed wiring diagram, my mind could never quite construct a situation that would produce the symptoms I was seeing.
"I hate computers," my friend Rod Gilbreath occasionally grumbles when flummoxed by their unexplainable misbehavior. I feel the same way about vehicles.
"Call an expert," my desperate self finally demanded. But my tightwad self procrastinated--until the smiling dog trotted out of the bushes beside the road. Slam fist on horn... feeble buzzzzz... no firm honk to warn the dog. Thankfully, it retreated in time.
Finally, my resolved self rose up, determined to locate and subdue the bad boy wire, and my helpless self breathed a prayer for divine intervention. Open the door... inside lights come on... radio display scrambles... press horn... but this time no buzz. A new clue!
Then instantly my lucid self embraced the answered prayer: a solution so obvious, so simple, so elementary that my embarrassed self refuses to reveal it here. But it worked--despite my analytical self's continuing inability to explain why.
Sometimes great learning sometimes hinders good thinking. And lack of understanding--how and why prayer really works, for example--never denies the facts.
Copyright 2004 James McAlister
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