Too Steep To Climb Alone

My friend’s daughter had a breakdown the other day, in public, and she was unhappy with the way she responded. Maybe the scene could have gone better, she thought, if she had known it was going to happen. So I asked her: how are you supposed to have known how to react… if it had never happened before?

Often we are thrown into unforeseen situations, conned, confused, abused, or just plain disappointed. And a little thought starts nipping at our heels: “I should have known better.”

Really?

How would we know how to react if we’ve never been screamed at by our children, betrayed by a friend, or lied to by a lover? Are we really supposed to punish ourselves for not having figured out everything the world can dish our way? Because we do, don’t we?

First of all, it’s presumptuous, based on some erroneously thought that we control – or can predict – the world, which we don’t. So these nice surprises, every now and then, keep us humble.

Yet I think there’s an even better reason that the learning curve is so steep. These situations have to be beyond our capacities, beyond our foresight, so we will finally do the one thing we haven’t tried yet:

ASK the universe for help.

I’m learning that it’s better to start asking the universe for that help early on in the process, friends, because the Universe knows how to double down harder that we do.

Later, I can hear the Universe chuckle, saying, “Did you see how much crap I had to throw at you to make you surrender? My goodness!”