If you're hoping to forget the chill of B.C., there's nothing like a subtropical stretch of beach to do the trick. Just as there's nothing like the rhythmic crash of surf to lull you into a sense of security.
On a trip to Maui earlier this month, my partner and I staked out a spot at Makena Beach for a day's relaxation. For summer reading, I had a sunblock-stained copy of People along with Nassim Nicholas Taleb's acclaimed 2007 book The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. The Lebanese-born author is a Harvard-educated "quant": a mathematical engineer from Wall Street.
In his book, Taleb assails assorted experts, including his brethren in the financial industry, for building oversimplified models of reality that extrapolate day-to-day trends into the future, while ignoring the outliers. The author insists that all the clever equations in the world cannot predict the timing of game-changing dislocations that upend jobs, lives, markets, and whole societies-and it's no good pretending otherwise.
The book's title riffs on how the sighting of one black swan demolishes the reasonable-sounding theory that "all swans are white." The 1928 stock market crash was a "Black Swan event," as was the rise of Google. Destructive Black Swans like the former take only minutes or hours; creative Black Swans like the latter can take months or more to evolve. Both varieties are often only understood in retrospect.
After putting down Taleb's book I walked over to the shoreline with the aim of body-surfing some big waves breaking near the shore, as my partner watched. It was great fun for a short time, until I mistimed a breaker that lifted me up and pounded me head-first into the sand. I broke the impact with my left hand and right elbow, while an enormous volume of water concertinaed my vertebrae. I thought I heard something crack somewhere in my body as I was thrown about like a sock puppet in the surf.
I stumbled back to the shore, smarting from the impact. I was concerned that I had seriously damaged myself. I thought of my father, who spent the final 10 years of his life in chronic pain from of a lower back injury.
As I painfully dropped onto my beach towel, the beach echoed with a sombre warning from a lifeguard station in the distance. "Please be careful. Life-changing spinal injuries happen on this beach. People crawl out with broken ribs. Parents, don't let your children near the surf, they could be swept away. Things break here. Many things."
I'd ridden the waves a number of times in Hawaii, usually during calmer summer months. This time I felt I'd been only inches, or a few pounds per square inch, away from a dislocating event of my own. My choice of reading was eerily appropriate. "Mistaking a nave observation of the past as something definitive or representative of the future is the one and only cause of our inability to understand the Black Swan." Got ya, Taleb.
The author cites a famous quote from the captain of the Titanic, E. J. Smith: "In all my experience_ I have seen but one vessel in distress in all my years at sea. I never saw a wreck nor was I ever in any predicament that threatened to end in disaster of any sort. You see, I am not very good material for a story."
When it comes to thinking about nations, markets, even our own bodies, many of us are like Smith-whose own Black Swan appeared in the form of an iceberg.
Push your limits and you may be inviting the dark bird to roost. Every summer in the North Shore neighbourhood where I live, rescue helicopters buzz overhead to retrieve injured or dead jumpers from the canyon pools nearby. Taleb's prose isn't likely to deter any testosterone-fuelled daredevils, but at least it gave pause to one aging reader and reminded him he's more bullheaded than bulletproof.
My spine turned out to be fine. After my close call in the surf, I internalized a truth I knew in my head but did not feel bodily: Mother Nature is one bodacious babe, but engage her without discernment and she just might hammer you into the ground like a splintered fencepost.
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