A Tepid Steamroom

Practicing going first

I went into the steamroom yesterday to relieve some congestion. I walked in and there were two guys sitting there, quiet and staring straight ahead. It was humid and warm, but there was very little steam to speak of.

Naturally, I sat down and stared straight ahead, waiting for the little nozzle to blow out a bunch of steam. We sat together for perhaps two minutes before one of the guys got up and left. Still, I sat and waited.

Finally, the other man in the erstwhile steamroom got up and poked his head outside the door and fiddled with the controls. Within a few seconds, the steam came on and it rushed in, blissfully hot and clouding the room, relieving us of the burden of glancing at one another.

While I sat in the steam I wondered: why hadn’t I just gotten up and looked to see if there was a switch I could have turned on? I'd thought about doing just that. But a couple of things had clouded my judgment, in the absence of the steam.

• Some version of “there can’t be a twenty dollar bill on the ground, because someone else would have picked it up” fallacy: if the solution were so easy, wouldn’t one of the two guys that were already in the steamroom have done it already?

• The fear of looking foolish or somehow offending these guys if I went to check for a dial. If it existed, it would imply that they were not masters of their steamroom domain, and if it did not, I would be an overeager interloper, an outsider who usually goes in the sauna instead and would do better staying there.

Naturally these don’t hold a lot of weight upon reflection. I was reminded of a quote from Gabrielle Reece, a famous professional volleyball player, that I really liked and I think is probably good advice to follow:

“I’ll go first. If I’m at checking out at the store I’ll say hello first, if I’m coming across someone making eye-contact I’ll smile first. Not all times, but most times — it comes in your favor.”

I think there is a lot of upside to going first in things and not very much real downside. And it seems pretty freeing to make it your default way of functioning.