A nail lay in the road.
I paused in the crosswalk, looked up and down the street– thankful it wasn’t busy– and reached for the nail.
Later in the day, squatting down like that would be dangerous, but not this morning.
Aluminum gray and lightweight, the nail looked innocuous enough.
While it may have been this morning, that does not mean it wouldn’t have been a problem later on.
Saving Humanity–or perhaps just the neighbors?
I started picking up random nails found in the street long ago when we lived in Navy housing.
The neighborhoods saw moving trucks delivering or picking up household goods weekly.
As a woman with few mechanical abilities, the thought of getting a nail in my car’s tire troubled me.
I’ve never had to change a tire before.
Some kind man always stopped to help!
I never suspected all those years ago that always would be my (happy) fate, and so I always pick up nails or screws in the street.
Both for me, and for other–potentially hapless–drivers.
But why pick up a nail in the street?
This week my Bible study reviewed the seventh commandment in Luther’s Small Catechism.
You shall not steal.
What does this mean? We should fear and love God so that we do not take our neighbor’s money or possessions, or get them in any dishonest way, but help him to improve and protect his possessions and income.
Luther’s Small Catechism (My choice to bold face)
We talked for a while about what it means to your neighbor if you help him/her protect or improve possessions or income.
Wouldn’t picking up a nail so they wouldn’t run over it be just that?
The Poem
You’re probably familiar with the poem, which basically works out to this:
For want of a
- nail, a horseshoe was lost,
- horseshoe, a horse went lame.
For want of a
- horse, a rider never got through,
- a rider, a message never arrived.
For want of a
- message, an army was never sent,
- an army, a battle was lost.
For want of
- a battle, a war was lost,
- a war, a kingdom fell,
and all for want of a nail.
Perhaps you haven’t heard how Benjamin Franklin ended it in 1758’s Poor Richard’s Almanack: “A little neglect may breed great mischief.”
Some interesting history
(Wikimedia Commons)
History records the concept as being first recorded in the 13th century, perhaps as early in Germany as 1230.
In English it appeared in John Gower’s 1390 Confessio Amantis:
“For sparinge of a litel cost, Fulofte time a man hath lost, The large cote for the hod.” (“For sparing a little cost often a man has lost the large coat for the hood).”
And, of course, Shakespeare’s King Richard III famously lamented, “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse,” after he lost his horse. (But was it for want of a nail? Maybe just the horse?)
During WWII, the Anglo-American Supply Headquarters in London framed the verse and hung it on the wall.
Wikipedia posted a long list of popular instances where books, movies, musicals, television, and even a YA novel (A Wind in the Door) by Madeleine L’Engle used the concept.
Lack of a nail, or is this really chaos?
Benjamin Franklin’s mischief concept provoked much interest through the years.
Modern thinkers–or perhaps just the military–call the idea, “Root-Cause Thinking Reveals That We Are Only as Strong as Our Weakest Link.”
Or, as “Clarence” noted (on a site that is blocked, sorry):
An important caveat is that these chains of causality are only ever seen in hindsight. Nobody ever lamented, upon seeing his unshod horse, that the kingdom would eventually fall because of it.
Equally important, yet tending to be overlooked, is that when we trace these events backward, starting from the fall of Rome and finally ascribing it to a blacksmith oversleeping one morning . . . We are following branches of a tree structure, and we don’t notice that at any point, we could have chosen a different path and ended up at a totally different conclusion.
It is also an illustration of the idea underpinning chaos theory, known as sensitive dependence on initial conditions; the initial condition being the presence or absence of the horseshoe nail.
The engineer in my house read this post and commented, “perhaps the ‘butterfly effect’ is a better analogy?
His point?
There’s always the chance that for want of a nail good things happen.
No nail, no chance of a flat tire–car or bike. No one would slip if the nail rolled under their shoe.
The college guy who stopped to help my friend change her tire might have married her.
You never know.
What was I thinking?
I took the nail home. I may use it to hang a picture.
Perhaps I’ll poke a hole in something or use it to pound our fence rail back into place.
I could hang up the tomato cage using that nail, or even the shovel–by getting it off the garage floor it might not trip me.
Anything could happen.
Flat tire potential, being a good neighbor, and pure curiosity, “I wonder where this nail came from?” is why I picked up the nail today.
But, at the same time, it’s nice to think I saved the world a little bit of chaos, isn’t it?
Tweetables
The science and neighborliness behind picking up a nail. Click to Tweet
What might you have lost for want of a nail? Click to Tweet
Thoughts? Reactions? Lurker?