The great-grandson of the Magic 8-Ball, the Google Machine, tells me that “mayday…mayday…mayday”, the international distress signal used by aircraft and ships to indicate imminent danger to life, originated from a phonetical pronunciation of the French phrase m’aider, which means “help me”. The dusty but trusty Funk & Wagnall defines “imminent” as something unpleasant that is certain to happen very soon.

Thanks to the silver screen, most of us can visualize how this whole mayday thing generally plays out. A pilot, in imminent danger, their cockpit filled with a chorus of warning alarms beeping and buzzing, is struggling mightily to prove Sir Isaac Newton’s silly theory wrong. “Mayday…mayday…mayday” they say to someone. Someone that is most likely having a much more agreeable experience with gravity. So it goes.

I always thought that the constant beeping and buzzing of the warning alarms would only make a bad situation worse. Maybe they are intended to make the spiral towards the ground so annoying that you welcome the impact?

There are several habits and such that us humans willingly engage in that will often lead to something unpleasant, not imminently, but slowly. Habits and such that often come with a variety of warnings, warnings that we’ve heard beeping and buzzing, but choose to ignore and climb onboard and ride out. Sometimes until impact.

Many moons ago, when I was a college baseball player masquerading as a college student, I started using chewing tobacco. Skoal Wintergreen Longcut was my dip of choice, and though it has been many years since I quit, a craving still finds me on occasion. Not a craving for the acrid taste or the burning sensation on my raw cheek and gums, but a craving for the way the nicotine would seemingly wash over me leaving a feeling of calm and contentment in its wake.

Cognitive dissonance is “the mental discomfort experienced when holding contradictory beliefs or behaviors, causing psychological stress that motivates people to reduce the discomfort by altering behaviors, justifying actions, or ignoring evidence.” I was well aware of the beeping and buzzing but I climbed onboard and that feeling of calm and contentment motivated me to ignore those pesky alarms and justify my actions by reasoning that “I only chew when…”

I enjoy playing my guitar and singing, and as you are most likely aware, singing requires a working throat attached to a not dead body. So, my desire to have a working throat to sing old country songs and sad Irish ballads and a not dead body to strum my guitar, was one of the motivations I leaned on to alter my behavior and kick cognitive dissonance to the curb.

Above and beyond music, my family was the prime motivator. I’d feel pretty stupid and selfish explaining to my family that I traded a few years of my health and quality time with them for a nicotine buzz. That “calm and contentment” would seem a bit hollow and meaningless if it resulted in me being unnecessarily dead or burdensome.

There was no imminent threat to my health, but there was research data and the many cautionary tales of those that had, or were, suffering the unpleasant downward spiral resulting from their many years of willfully ignoring the beeping and the buzzing until a “m’aider” plea was made too close to impact to be of much use. To be of much use to them anyway.

Meaningful motivation. The key to straightening up and flying right. Happy mayday…mayday…mayday.