This story is a bit long but please bear with me, as it has its moral. It's about a kiteboard, a stranger and my brain.
This is what happened to me a few days ago. I was on a beach with my girlfriend. We were playing with my kite on the sand - I was trying to teach her how the kite works.
At some point, a man approached us and told us that he had found a kiting board on the beach and asked us if it was ours. The board was quite a long way from the place where we stood but still it was a valid question, as there were no other kiters on the beach at that time.
No, it's not ours - we replied.
He suggested we go and take the board anyway, as there was clearly no-one else to claim it. Someone must have lost it in the sea long time ago.
We thanked him for sharing this information with us. Then the man left.
After a few minutes we landed our kite. While my girlfriend stayed to take care of the gear, I set off to find the board, as the man suggested.
After several minutes' walk, I did find the board. But somebody was already sitting next to it and I wasn't really sure if it was the same man who told us about the board. This might sound strange but that's how it was: I have quite terrible memory for faces and I was a bit busy with the kite when he had been talking to us - that's why I wasn't sure if it was him or not. Clearly he was not a kiter, as he didn't have any other gear - just the board.
The obvious thing to do was to approach him and simply ask if the board was his.
But for some reason I started hesitating. There are two possibilities - I thought. Either this guy is the actual owner and I will make a fool of myself. Or he has just found the board before I had a chance to grab it so I have no right to claim it. Even if it's the same guy who had told us about the board, he apparently changed his mind and decided to keep the board to himself.
Then I concluded: Whatever the case is, this board is not gonna be mine. And then I turned away and walked back.
When I arrived at our spot, I described the guy to my girlfriend and she confirmed that it must have been the same man. At that point I already started to regret my decision about not talking to him but then I thought to myself that I did not really need another board. Let's move on - I thought.
The wind started to pick up. Nice, stable wind - perfect for kiting.
I started to set up my gear and then something unexpected happened - I realized I had not packed some crucial part of my foot-straps, which made my board quite useless. So there will be no kiting today. Or on any other day, as I must have left it at home (500 miles away).
If you are a kiter you know how it feels: it really sucks to witness perfect wind on a sunny day and not be able to play with it. Especially when you have all the gear with you, except one little part.
I rushed back to the place where the man with the board was. But of course it was too late - he was already gone. So was the board.
And then it started to occur to me what the most plausible explanation was: the guy, who was kind enough to tell us about the board, went back to the place where he had found it and just waited for us to pick it up. He probably did not recognize me as well (all the more that I acted so strangely), so he just sat quietly and waited. And then he left thinking we turned down his offer.
It was totally unbelievable that on a very empty beach a total stranger had offered a kiting board to me just half an hour before I desperately needed one. What were the chances of this happening? And still I rejected it.
I felt totally stupid. I didn't want to make a fool of myself in front of a stranger and look what happened instead - I did make an even bigger fool of myself in my own eyes. My brain had made some baseless assumptions about this guy's intentions and then got stuck with them, completely closed to other possibilities.
The matrix has offered me a really valuable lesson that day. I felt physically ill deep inside. It felt like my brain was already in the process of hard-coding not to do a similar mistake ever again.
Never ever make any assumptions when interacting with other people. It's your brain playing tricks on you, afraid to get out of the comfort zone.
You're not sure of something - just ask (and be ready to accept an unexpected answer). You want something - just say it (and be ready to accept rejection).
But never let your brain make any assumptions about other people's intentions.
Your brain is not your friend and it's not to be trusted.
How many times have you been just about to approach a stranger but then you changed your mind in the very last moment?
How many friendships or love affairs have not come into existence just because our brain has made some stupid assumptions?
Remember that feeling afterwards? This terrible feeling of lost opportunity.
It's pure pain. Rightly so. Otherwise we never learn.