Unpredictable!
Prepare for the unknown by studying how others in the past have coped with the unforeseeable and the unpredictable. -George S. Patton (1885-1945), U.S. Army General famous for his command during WWII.
Was Murphy Right
Why don’t all the pieces of the puzzle come together exactly the way we would like them to? Why do events seem to unfold their own way and not line up with our time table? What about this guy Murphy and his law that anything that could go wrong will? Why does he seem to be right all the time? Or his he ever right?
Let’s first consider how important it is for the human brain to make sense of everything. We take the millions of bits of information we are exposed to and hurriedly pack them away in neat little storage bins. We then make sense of events based on what we already know and feel quite unsettled when we can’t seem to put it all together.
Fabricate and Protect
You see, the loss of control is a massive source of anxiety and when we can’t understand something very easily, we tend to panic. We search the internal records to make a match and even tend to allow for mistaken interpretations based entirely on lack of evidence. However, before we get too far off track, let’s just say we are very uncomfortable with things we don’t know or recognize.
So what does this information overload do to us. Well, it can make us downright crazy. We can babble on trying to control it, understand it and rationalize. We’ll even go as far making up an entire story that makes no sense. The brightest amongst us struggle the most as they pride themselves on their intellect and ability to organize.
Natural Disaster
This still begs the question as to why it’s so important to keep information in a particular order. What’s so important about controlling everything and is that even a realistic endeavor? Absolutely NOT! Have we really forgotten that life is completely unpredictable. We have no idea what’s going to happen next!
Just because certain events may seem to be repeating themselves, there is definitely no guarantee that any pattern will continue. In fact our very existence hangs in the balance every nanosecond of every day. What if the Earth fell off of its axis or its perfect atmospheric balance springs a leak? Plain and simply…it’s over. Natural disasters are one of the biggest killers of humans in the world. Our inability to predict them and make sense of them is perhaps why we are left so frazzled in their wake.
World Attack
So what’s the answer? Let’s just embrace the fact that life is unpredictable and really unmanageable. World events are uncaged and follow no clear pattern. It’s simply a fact of our existence. But we certainly are prepared with plenty of tools to cope, otherwise life itself would be completely unbearable. Those that survive the best, draw upon all of that stored information to find new solutions rather than fit the new challenge into and old form.
If we will simply except that we are incapable of controlling events then perhaps we would be more ready to evolve. Rather than hide under the bed when the world attacks, why not embrace the sudden course correction as an opportunity to shift gears and move in new directions. We might just discover that this bag of thinking tools we have been developing is the remedy for all that is to come whether we like it or not!
