"Look before you leap" or "He who hesitates is lost"?

I guess we all know we can't run our lives by proverbs. But they can offer good advice. But what do you do when they conflict? The two proverbs in the title are just two of the ones you hear all the time and, I find, mentioned after you've just made a mistake. You jump into the car to rush to the store and back over a child's favorite toy. "You know what they say," your neighbor explains, "Look before you leap." But surely, if I would have looked, removed the toy and then had to wait at the end of the driveway as a line of cars passes, the neighbor would have said, "You know what they say. He who hesitates is lost." Rarely is anyone there to help when you really need it.

But then you hear about the "morality" test where they ask if you were walking along the railroad tracks and you see five people up ahead in an area where the track is bounded by two steep cliffs and there is no way to get off the tracks. Then you hear a train coming. You are standing by a switch that would allow the train to be switched off the track onto a siding where one person is walking. Is it OK to kill that one person to save the five? Well, according to the test folks, most people say it's OK to switch the train and trade one life for five. But take a moment and think about all the gray areas of this question. How are you sure that the five people couldn't lie down next to the track? Trains and their cars don't hang over that much. Maybe the one person can get off the siding. What happens when the train goes into the siding and wrecks. Who will be killed on the train and in the siding area? These kinds of made-up situations drive me crazy. It seems to me that we rarely have all the facts and these "tests" just hide even more of them.

I remember an old movie about guys being inducted into the Navy during World War 2 (it was an old movie). The officer asks the inductee what he would do if a storm came up from the starboard side. The inductee answers, "Throw an anchor off the starboard side, sir." Then the officer says, "But then a storm blows up and hits you from the stern. What do you do?" The inductee answers, " Throw an anchor off the stern, sir." The officer isn't beat and says, "Now an even more intense storm blows up and starts hitting your port side. What do you do?" The inductee says, "Well, I'd throw an anchor off the port side, sir." The officer gets angry and says, "And where are you going to get all these anchors?" The inductee shrugs and says, "The same place you got all those storms blowing in different directions, sir."