"That's hard," said the young salesman, "when you have nobody to blame." I had just arrived at the bike shop looking, I said, for chain oil, hydrogen peroxide, a new left pedal, and a refill of pride. Turning left from Twelfth Avenue onto Howard Street I had encountered an unexpectedly slippery patch of wet leaves, fallen into the road, scraped my knee, broken my pedal, and dismantled the hillock of pride I had build over my bicycling skills.
"We've all done it," the salesman had opined, possibly thinking to ease my bruised pride (as the bike store stocks nothing for scraped knees). But it was his other remark which held focus for the running dialog at the bak of my mind. Would it be less hard on my pride if there had been someone to blame? If I had crashed because a thoughtless homeowner had piled the refuse of his lawn in the traffic lane, would that have been less humiliating than slipping on a patch of natural leaf fall? My inclination is to avoid experimentation and settle for speculation.
I speculate that blame would not make it any easier. I think that if I were able to fault someone else, that would certainly have made it simpler for me to rouse up an illusion of righteous anger. (That is, the anger would be real but the righteousness of it more doubtful.) Being angry is a lot like doing amateur masonry; you pile up the second-hand bricks, with a slapping of poorly mixed, mortar between yourself and the object of your ire. Ostensibly, this is to protect you from the dangers which have already damaged your bicycle and your knee, much along the lines of locking the bike after it is stolen. Behind this wall of hot emotion the fresh hillock of false pride is comparatively safe from erosion by adventitious reality.
The question about which we are speculating is this: Would the experience be easier if the mound of pride is preserved or if it is eroded by the floods of actuality?
Losing anything at all, whether it is a bike pedal or a bit of pride, is never an especially happy experience. Yet I would speculate that in actual reality the loss of a hill of pride is less painful than the gain of a fire of blame.
I say that I do not want to repeat the experience under a variety of conditions, and certainly not sufficiently often as to assemble a statistically valid sample of individual experiences. I shall instead speculate that, in the actual reality game, a little actual reality is a better basis for making my plays than would be a contingent of culpable strangers.