CHECK YOUR TIRES
Thursday, March 31, 2022
Expect the unexpected.
Expecting the unexpected is like waiting for Godot …
And in recognizing that principle of expecting the unexpected, we need to accept and respect reality – that the unexpected will be unexpected in terms of what, who, when, where and why.
The unexpected is the ‘bridge out’ sign.
Too often, we only think of the unexpected when It’s the lockdown, it’s the war, it’s the protest convoy, it’s the slip on the ice – and when these things happen, we ask, “shouldn’t have someone seen that coming?” …
The unexpected is rarely as severe as the ‘bridge out’ sign. It’s like Tuesday, coming home from the office, when someone honked from the next lane while I was at a red light one block from home. He got my attention. He was pointing to my right front tire. It wasn’t flat yet, but dangerously low. Fortunately, there was a gas bar with an air hose on that corner – and, re-inflated, I made my way to my friends at Midnapore Auto Care, deposited keys and a ‘please, please, please can you service my car without an appointment + fix my tire’ note through their after-hours key-drop box.
Working from home, something I’ve been gravitating away from, was suddenly the ‘unexpected’ opportunity yesterday. It caused me to move some things around on my calendar, some morning things became afternoon things, and by 10 AM, my equilibrium was restored.
But that’s just stuff – we all have these moments of oops, changes, rescheduling and postponement and recalculation.
These are conditioning, are they not?
They aren’t major very often; these unexpected events condition us – we develop the dexterity to handle them – they condition us for staying calm in the eye of a storm when the storm comes, they condition us for coping with REAL trouble when it shows up. They prepare us for reversals of fortune, the reality of tragedy, and for acceptance of the truths we would prefer to deny.
We all set out to conquer the world but don’t.
We all set out not to be the drama in our lives, but then we are.
We all set out to have the basics of family, friends, and careers – to have deep meaning and stabilizing forces in our lives of calm, but that is where most of our strife resides. And much of that is self-inflicted through what we say or do (often recognized immediately after we said it or did it) and too often over what we failed to say or failed to do a long time ago.
Apologies and forgiveness help.
But do they solve?
No action, nor thought or words can reverse time or reality – wishes and good intentions are wishes and good intentions. We cannot control what others say or do, fail to say or fail to do, any more than we can control what they fail to feel or believe, and we are powerless to change that.
And that should not be unexpected …
We must accept reality.
There is, however, one way to change reality.
We can change what we do and take action, or choose to see things differently – and commit ourselves to make them different while knowing that whatever we expect to do or create will likely turn out in ways we didn’t expect.
p.s.: it’s always a good idea to walk around our vehicle before getting in, just in case we have a low tire needing attention
Reader feedback:
Mark; I like a quote I read recently. It said “When you are over seventy ‘the other day’ can be anytime in the last five years.”, GB, Calgary, AB
I like that quote—it reminds me of the collective memories of my sisters and me. Any event from our childhood has four completely different versions. Mine is accurate of course; theirs are flawed. I see the same thing happening with my kids and their varying perspectives on events in their youth and, again, my memory is closest to the truth—at least until I get old and my memory starts to turn fact into fiction, HM, Calgary, AB