we may not think of it in quite such
naive terms but we are liable to start
out somewhere in a semi-conscious mind
with a script of how our lives might go
first we'll come education with its deep
friendships moments of intoxicating
self-discovery tender first loves and
appoints sheer riotous good fun then
will come a career something that pays
but won't be done merely for money will
be competent respectable and fairly
honored for the intensity of our efforts
alongside it will come a central
relationship probably a marriage the
union will last forever
and be marked by mutual satisfaction
sincere friendship and frequent
passionate sex there'll be kids too
offering us a chance to nurture a
grateful adorable small person the best
of its two parents whom we'll watch grow
into an admirable motivated adult with
advances in science we will lead an
active and pain-free life mentally and
physically healthy into our early 80s at
least our parents will themselves have
died at an advanced age and when the
time comes for us the end will be swift
and painless this is more or less the
kind of script were handed by a
technologically advanced secular
consumer society and it's no wonder that
in many moods we should want to cleave
to it and trust it wholeheartedly but
the truth never asserted as a general
rule never insisted upon in tones of
suitable melancholy solemnity is that no
one gets through their allotted span on
earth without a major off-script event
something somewhere is going to go
catastrophic ly wrong not potentially or
incidentally but necessarily because of
the structure of human existence and of
our appalling exposure to error accident
madness disgrace and illness
someone very important to us will die
long before they should in horrific and
entirely unexpected circumstances Oh
will suffer a significant reversal in
professional life probably triggered by
a fully on our part an entrenched
character flaw or just a collision with
one of the very sharp edges of the
business cycle or a central relationship
will go wrong a child will develop a
major grievance someone whom we
entrusted entirely will betray all the
hopes we'd lodged in them illness and
death will strike from the blue a stroke
on the airport concourse cancerous cells
in an unfeasibly young body a hemorrhage
that came at least twenty years too soon
the permutations are as endless as they
are ghastly we cannot know what it will
be exactly what is certain is that it
will be something an event committed ly
disastrous in nature that will stop us
in our tracks make us question every
resilient assumption and break our
hearts the only guarantee is that we
will not exit this life without a
calamity if there is any defense or
consolation to be found it lies of
course in knowing the fact head-on and
preparing for it assiduously in a
quieter stretches to philosophize is to
learn to die new the French philosopher
Montaigne and he might have added to be
more all-encompassing to suffer to
expecting the unexpected horror is the
one move we can make to insulate
ourselves a little from the vengefulness
and wickedness of fortune we know that
something will come and when it happens
we shouldn't feel especially cursed our
lives may appear to have gone off script
but that's only because the script we
were holding to was a sentimental lie we
are in fact following the path that all
humans must walk we should never feel
persecuted for falling victim to what is
the repressed yet general truth it is at
least on the basis of off-script events
that we can develop our deep
friendships surrender our
self-righteousness acquire the right
kind of gallows humor and grow up newly
aware of the ubiquity of random
disasters we can start to appreciate the
bits of our lives that are on script we
can know just how much to cherish those
quiet days in which nothing much has yet
gone very wrong and when the off-script
event comes we can at least say that we
knew and realized a while back that this
is just what it means to be human
our resilience cards are designed to
help us become tougher in the face of
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