Saturday morning, I was on a train from Basel, Switzerland, to Bern, and the sun was at just the right level to blind me, so I pulled the shade down. At the first stop, a woman got on, sat down across from me, and immediately raised the window shade, telling me she wanted to see the beautiful Swiss countryside.
With the window shade up, the train pulled out of the train station, and we were both immediately blinded by the sun. She rather sheepishly reached up to lower the shade, and I said, “That’s why I had it down.”
So often we enter a situation and immediately apply what we learned before, without pausing to see whether things are different here.
This changing things without knowing why they are that way in the first place violates a principle called Chesterton’s Fence. This comes from G.K. Chesterton’s 1929 book The Thing, in the chapter “The Drift from Domesticity.” Chesterton explains that you should never remove a fence, law, or tradition without first understanding why it was built to begin with. Chesterton wrote:
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