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Thursday, November 21, 2013

Unpredictable


by Susan Cameron

Unpredictable, that's what life is. We do the best we can with our plans and projections, but there we are -- driving along on our usual route on an ordinary day, when an incoming meteor blasts through the clouds, a hurtling fireball screaming through a previously untroubled sky, and it explodes and sends shock waves that shatter our windows and send us reeling. We like to imagine we're in control, but -- meteors happen.

How about the friends who blow hot and cold, or the spouse who does the same? A career that rolls along, predictable as the tides, until a tsunami of layoffs comes crashing onto the beach? The shadow on the X-ray? The money invested with Bernie Madoff? The Enron pension?

I read the news, check the bank balances, get the latest news on my stock holdings, go three times a year to www.annualcreditreport.com, fix all the problems that I can see or anticipate; but despite all my proactivity, there isn't one damn thing I can do about life's meteors.

Susan Cameron
copyright 2013

2 comments:

  1. So glad you posted this. I enjoyed reading it as much this time as the first time we heard it this morning!

    So funny (and sometimes not) and so true!

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  2. When my first child was born, someone gave me a book by a woman named Gladys (can't remember her last name) whose job it was to help out when new babies came into a household. The thing I remember most from Gladys's book (aside from her recipe for pork chops and scalloped potatoes) had to do with handling the unpredictable baby. Gladys said something like this: "It's not what the baby does that matters - you can't control that - it's what you do about it." The meteors will come. We can't predict when or how the disruption to our lives will happen. But we can control how we react to it, what we do about it after it showers down on us.

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