Heroes Not Zombies

This is another of Hokusai’s prints, this time it’s a floating bridge.
When I looked at this first I thought why doesn’t the bridge go straight across the river? Why is it on a curve like that? Then I read that it is a floating bridge. Floating bridges are made from small boats or “pontoons” tied together. It moves with the flow of the water.
Have you ever seen such a bridge? Ever walked over such a bridge?
I haven’t.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t look at it and feel very confident. But this is a winter scene and it’s clear that the bridge, like everything else in the scene, is covered with snow. Well, snow and ice I suspect! With that realisation my already low confidence level plummets. Cripes! Really? Walk across a floating bridge that’s covered with ice and snow?
You’d have to be desperate, wouldn’t you?
Or maybe not. Maybe it’s a journey you’ve made many, many times, without any difficulties or disasters. So your confidence is actually high.
I often wonder about the phenomenon of confidence. How we get on a plane, or a train, or get into a bus or a car, and don’t really consider for a moment that we might not get to our destination, or even that we might not get there in one piece. But how many people are injured or killed traveling in cars, buses, trains or planes, or boats for that matter, every year? None of their journeys worked out for them.
But we can’t live like that, can we? We can’t live with the constant fear that the journeys we’ve made time and time again without any problems might turn out to be our last this time?
So we gain our confidence from our experience and we set off, probably not even giving it a second thought.
I suppose that’s the alternative to being paralyzed by fear – to cope with things as they happen – or, to put it another way, to cross the bridge when we come to it!