I may have mentioned that we were at the beach last week.
Usually in my mornings on the beach I take a walk down the beach collecting seashells. Never mind that this year the walking on the beach was challenging due to a back issue I’ve got going on.
Beyond that there just weren’t many shells on the beach. The ocean was quite calm and perhaps they just weren’t washing ashore.
Either that or all of the other vacationers picked them clean.
This post is not about disappointment. Sure I would have liked to have my morning walks on the beach and come back with another bucket of shells. It didn’t happen and that’s okay.
Sometimes we expect things to be a certain way. We imagine what life will be like. Or we expect that each experience will be the same because it’s been that way for years.
Life doesn’t work that way.
Sometimes you have to expect the unexpected.
The challenge is being ready to face whatever that might be.
My re-entry to the day job didn’t go exactly as planned yesterday. I opted to put the gym off one more day so that I could get some extra sleep. That was just a change in plans.
But the traffic patterns I encountered downtown were completely unexpected. As were the three projects I got going on before I had my first cup of office coffee.
Not to mention the fact that I forgot my voicemail password and got locked out of the system.
None of those were a really big deal. I dealt with them and moved on.
Sometimes the unexpected comes in bigger doses.
I’m not superstitious but, at the same time, I’m not going to list examples. You know whereof I speak and you can come up with your own examples.
Life is all about how we deal with the unexpected. Sometimes that makes life exciting. Sometimes it makes life terrifying.
And sometimes it just means that we have to be content to look at last year’s seashells.
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