Newsletter #15 Dealing with the Unexpected Events in Our Lives
How can you prepare for the unexpected?
For this week’s issue, I want to lean on the unexpected events in our lives.
Personally, I suck at dealing with the unexpected. When a preplanned event gets canceled or delayed, I despise it.
In my little tidy corner of the world, I want everything to be organized, scheduled, predictable, and go according to plan, which mostly isn’t the case. That’s why when something goes out of my control, I don’t know how to regulate my emotions properly.
That’s something I really have to work on.
The harsh reality is that, you can’t prevent the unexpected. What you can do instead is to learn how to effectively deal with the unexpected, and change your reaction to it.
There will always be last-minute changed plans or something that happens that ambushes all of your plans, that you could have not foreseen.
This week, I had two of these events, one of them much more major.
I had a good start to the week. I wrote on Medium, worked on my drafts, created new ones, and submitted an article. I was on the roll and imagined myself of having a productive week, unknowing of what’s to come.
I also started reading books once again, after a period of drought in that department. I reinvigorated my daily walks and started to go walk by the seaside pathway near my house, blasting my favorite music from my headphones and getting lost in thoughts, at every sunset.
After a such refreshing walk on a Tuesday evening, when I returned back home and tried to open my laptop, its external cover cracked. I was appalled and obviously not expecting that to happen. I couldn’t open my laptop fully as I was afraid I might have caused further damage.
My laptop is fairly old, it has been used for 6 to 7 years now, and I was planning to buy a new laptop whenever I got the chance, but this event happened at such a bad and critical time when I was trying to get ahead in my project and also proceed with my master’s applications.
I had all my important documents and the data of my project stored there. I was afraid they would get deleted, as I remembered I didn’t back up the most recent files on my computer.
Luckily, I know a very reliable computer repairman, and my issue got fixed in a day, to my surprise. I turned in my computer on Wednesday morning, and got it back one day later, on Thursday morning, brand new.
But from Tuesday evening to Thursday morning, I felt the lacking of my computer with every ounce of my being and understood that my life really heavily depends on a computer. Isn’t this the case for most of us?
My job, my entertainment, my writing… Everything is stored and reached through there. That’s why I felt like my hands were tied when there was no computer around.
But on the other hand, I spent more time with my family, and funnily, my broken computer gave me the oppurtinity to rest, as I finally had an excuse to rest.
The second unexpected event, which is a much more terrifying one, is the loss of a family relative. This only happened yesterday. It was a person no one in our family guessed would die right now, so it was shocking to all of us.
But it reminded me that the life is short, and death is unexpected and merciless.
I have been reading Black Swan by Nassim Nicolas Taleb, a highly reputable book you may heard of or read before, that talks about the impact of the unexpected, and devotes the book to this issue.
I originally started that book a year ago but due to my lack of reading habits, I couldn’t finish it. I started over from where I left off, and I’m immersed in it now.
I currently knocked off 100 pages of it, but I plan on writing about the concepts in the book as soon as I finish it. I’ve been taking notes…
The book talks about being prepared for unexpected situations, and how our mind can be blind to such unexpected events, or can focus on the wrong ones.
It can be a good guide to equip myself in the face of unexpected situations, and be conscious that they are inevitable in our lives. When you make peace with that fact, perhaps, your reactions become more healthier.
As for what I wrote this week, a new Medium article will be published tomorrow, so I’ll wait for you in my Medium profile. Other than that, I’m working on new drafts and excited to get them finished as soon as I can!
On that note, thank you for reading and thinking with me, hope to see you next week!