Don't Panic
I may have mentioned that Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is one of my favorite series of books. I’ve made reference to it before in this blog, though I may not have talked about my love for it explicitly. For those of you who don’t know, the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy is the best guide book for those seeking to travel through the universe on less than 30 Altarrian Dollars a day, seeing all there is to see and avoiding all there is to avoid. Its field researchers are the most intrepid, persevering, and downright fun-to-be-around folks you’re going to find; they can be trusted to tell you what you need to know. On the front of the Guide, which is distributed electronically in a package much like a mobile phone but with a nifty sliding cover, are stamped the simple words “don’t panic.” Good advice, hard to follow.
I, of course, need this advice on my person at all times. Ironically, telling a panicking person “don’t panic” is about the worst way to calm them down. I would know: I panic a lot, and when the Guide writer in me says “don’t panic” I begin to quiver. In the Adams books, the Guide writer goes by the name of Ford Prefect, and his hapless foil is called Arthur Dent. I think that I am a little bit of both of them: when the Ford Prefect in me says “don’t panic”, the Arthur Dent screams back “lot of help that does!” I can usually hold it together just enough to get where I’m going, but it’s not pretty. As I’ve said before, I fly by the seat of my pants.
Today, I left beautiful Sorrento and am heading to Cosenza, in Calabria. My current strategy is to continue thence to Sicily, then Tunis, then Sardinia. We’ll see how much of it works out, but it’s good to have a bit of an idea of what I’m up to. I have just under two months before I have to be in Scotland, but I’ll find a flight from wherever I am to there when the time comes. In the meantime, I’m riding the rails again.
The light rail from Sorrento to Naples isn’t very reliable: it stalled out half-a-dozen stops from Naples, and we had to change trains after fifteen or twenty minutes of waiting. In total, it took about two hours from Sorrento to Naples, that is, from termninal to terminal. I passed Pompei and Herculaneum along the way, if that gives you an idea of the geography: Naples is at the north end of the bay, Mount Vesuvius in the middle, and Sorrento at the south. To continue south to Calabria, though, I had to come through the large station in Naples to catch a heavy train: there’s only light rail linking Sorrento to Naples.
I got to the station, which was another mess: Napoli Garibaldi and Napoli Centrale are two seperate stations that share a building. In practical terms, this means that the ticket machines in the basement default to Garibaldi and on the ground floor to Centrale; the trains available from the two are different. In retrospect, I probably could have changed the departure station on the machine downstairs, but by that point I wasn’t in a position to be thinking logically about the situation. I had made the tactical choice not to get my ticket in advance, in case the trains didn’t connect cleanly. I arrived behind schedule in Naples but with fifteen minutes to make my connection, so I had to buy my ticket and make the second train in that time.
It is in these moments that I begin to panic, and in these moments when panic is the least helpful. They’re also the moments that make me glad I’m travelling alone: it wouldn’t be fair to anyone else to subject them to the stress and chaos I can produce in fifteen minutes in a train station. I think, though, that not-panic must be practiced: we must cultivate not-panic in our daily moving through the world. In other words, it’s not something you learn all at once: you have to work at it over time.
That’s why it’s on the cover of the guide: to remind you every time you look at it of a simple guiding precept for traveling. And it’s on the cover of the guide not because the guide’s users aren’t panicking, but precisely because they are. Otherwise, it wouldn’t make sense to say it. Maybe the first step is to be aware that we are panicking, and that’s what the guide’s obnoxious message is telling us: when someone says “don’t panic”, the violence of our response is a measure of how much we are, in fact, panicking. And realizing “I’m panicking” is already an improvement.
