The Table Can Flip
Prepare for it. What is it you ask? Well, let’s say you run into an old friend at the grocery store to learn she’s going through a divorce. You hear her talk. You try and support her. All the while you’re thinking about your own marriage. Maybe, playing with your ring or questioning your own marriage. Then you become shocked when you find yourself researching divorce lawyers. Prepare for it.
You help a friend move. You loan a friend money. You donate money to charity. Prepare for needing the same help. The same loan or the same charity to help you. You help a friend with their anxiety or depressed state. What if it happened to you? Prepare for it.
Yes, you’re asking yourself how can you prepare for any of these. Nothing should be unexpected. Nothing should be a surprise. Life ultimately will take you where it takes you. What are you going to do, shelter in place hoping it all goes away?
Just like you can plan for dinner a week in advance with a friend. Just like you can plan out the entire vacation by looking at your phone. Take the same approach to the unpleasant turn of events that can happen. They may not, but plan for them. Because it can all happen to you.
You said COVID isn’t a bid deal until you lost someone you loved. You thought driving after a few drinks wasn’t a big deal until you ended up in a bad accident.
Author Joan Didion writes in Blue Nights -
“Could you have seen, had you been walking on Amsterdam Avenue and caught sight of the bridal party that day, how utterly unprepared the mother of the bride was to accept what would happen before the year 2003 had even ended? The father of the bride died at his own dinner table? The bride herself in an induced coma, breathing only on a respirator, not expected by the doctors in the intensive care unit to live the night? The first in a cascade of medical crises that would end twenty months later with her own death?”
Joan Didion lost her husband in their home, at their dinner table. She would then run to the fridge where she had the phone number for emergency response. Didion would recall that she kept the number on her fridge in the event someone in the building needed it. Because she did not think that she would need to make that call. Didion also lost her daughter. You hear of these things happening, to them. To other people. Not to you! But it can happen to you. It can all happen. You are not the exception.
Prepare for it. That is the rule.
What are your thoughts on this blog? Comment below…
Thought Provoking Questions : It can happen to you. Are you prepared for it?
Daily I write and release a daily meditation. A quick read. Sharing wisdom and asking thought-provoking questions. Influenced by the obstacles, success and failures in my life and of others. Using history, books, current events, philosophy, and ancient wisdom. These writings are actionable, thought-provoking, designed to make your life better.
These writings are not to push a way of thinking on the reader or to force you into a certain philosophy or methodology. Rather to give you practical and real ways to handle life. This is an added tool. My writing is simply a discussion, a discourse, with all the material I read, watch, hear and consume.