"Change rooms in your mind for a day."

It's a line from a poem by Hafiz. I came across it today as I enjoyed yet another snow day in my apartment and spent the afternoon on the internet.

I feel like it's critically important to take a day every once in a while to do something you don't usually do. It doesn't have to be a huge adventure, though those are fun. Sometimes it's enough to expose yourself to a different way of thinking. Besides a short walk today I didn't leave my apartment, but I feel like I now have a totally different perspective than I had this morning.

I tend to be selectively risk-averse. In areas where I think if I think about it hard enough, I'll come to a right answer (and cheat the risk), I tend to favor risks and bold behavior. For example, the 'out there' ideas I have for arsenic metabolism genes are not nearly as exciting for my PI (who wants to start with more obvious and likely-to-yield-a-positive-result candidate genes) as they are for me.

But in areas where I don't feel like I can think away the risk, I am super risk-averse. For example: HIV. I was so concerned about contracting HIV that I worried I might get it from touching door handles with a cut fingertip if someone with HIV and a similar cut had touched the surface recently before me. You can imagine how this affects my attitudes toward sex.

But I realized today that the risk-to-benefit ratio isn't that skewed in real life. This doesn't mean I'm about to start hooking up with random strangers, but I feel like I changed my perspective on how I evaluate risks. I think of (low probability) undesired outcomes as possibilities now, instead of as "almost certainties". My stress level has gone way down.

It's funny that my emotional response to risk is so strong when I plan to spend my career estimating risk, and am comfortable describing events like cancer or heart attacks in detached and academic terms. I think it's that I don't have good numbers in mind when I think about the things that I feel are more likely to happen to me personally.