As the days of our lives turn into the years of our lives, the building blocks of the passage of time are made up of patterns, habits and repetition. When we look back, we see the highlights decorating our personal history with memories of special events and unique experiences. but like trophies, framed pictures and art objects, they merely adorn the mantel of the fireplace built with identical bricks and mundane mortar. My mornings are filled with rituals and routines. Most weekdays I wake up and exercise on my stationary bike or, weather permitting, take a real bike ride on the Olentangy Trail. If I take the trail south, I always look for the white heron standing in the wetlands. If I go north, on my return I will detour through the prairie wildflower preserve.
Each morning I have to be in Court, I must walk through a metal detector. During my wayward youth, I developed a survival instinct triggered by the presence of law enforcement that assesses my vulnerability to being arrested by doing a mental scan of my physical circumstances. There must have been hundreds of times as I approached the courthouse checkpoint that I questioned whether I might be carrying some contraband paraphernalia and imagining the consequences of it being discovered if I set off the alarm. This morning, I was going through my usual self-inventory as I walked up to the x-ray machine conveyer belt when my fingertips detected the slender wooden box housing the metal mock cigarette that I had picked up off the bedroom end table and pocketed with the intent of returning it to the den before I left the house. Depending on my short-term memory is always risky behavior and now the dangerous situation I had imagined so often was upon me.
I flashed back to the image I had seen just minutes earlier outside the courthouse of a handcuffed, barefooted man in a white tee shirt and what looked like black boxer shorts being escorted by a sheriff down the sidewalk towards the back entrance to the jail. I had wondered how he came to be transported in such a state of undress. Had the cops rousted him out of bed to execute a warrant for his arrest or had he rushed outside chasing after someone in a fit of passion during a domestic dispute?
Even though I had often considered the possibility of finding myself in this predicament, I had never formulated a plan to deal with it. Without looking directly at them, I knew there were usually four or five security officers staffing the station and that I was likely being observed. They see me walk through there almost daily so I was trying to maintain my normal flow of activity by placing my bag and the tray with my phone and keys on the belt while frantically calculating my options. I let my belongings pass through the x-ray and then made a momentary retreat around the corner to think. I realized I was now acting suspiciously and the “flight or fight” response hormones were coursing through my body. I had an unusually busy schedule that required me to be in three different courtrooms so I had been particularly focused on being punctual that morning. Weighing the gravity of my responsibility to clients, opposing counsel and the Court against the inconvenience and the perversely anomalous nature of just abandoning my entrance in midstream and returning to my office, I allowed myself to be swept away by the momentum of my familiar pattern of behavior, braving the dangerous rapids of the magnetometer.
