On the Unpredictability of Life
Life throws curves—at least it does to me. Sometimes large curves. I’m going to focus here on a few small ones.
I assume people who meticulously plan are thrown off-balance by such little curves less often than I am, though I doubt it is possible to subtract all the unpredictability from life.
I do not meticulously plan. That is not because I get a thrill out of being surprised. It is because I seem to be able to handle being surprised and because I’m usually too lazy for meticulous planning.
The particular lesson on the unpredictability of life I want to share here is based on a few very small surprises that presented themselves while my wife and I were visiting the Seychelles Islands. We were there because at some point we realized that going back to New York City for a fortnight in between an extended sojourn in Paris and a safari in Kenya made less sense even than most of our other travel decisions.
So we spent a couple of quite pleasant weeks on two of the Seychelles Islands—the largest one, Mahé, and La Digue, a bicycle-only island with truly spectacular beaches.
No curves there: the two of us having enjoyed an idyll on a couple of tropical islands was entirely predictable.
We were in the departure side of the airport on Mahé when the first two events I could not have predicted would happen happened.
We were looking, as we often are, to charge our phones, which being a bit long in the tooth, are not adept at holding charges. We had a two-part nighttime flight ahead of us: Mahé to Addis Ababa to Nairobi. And my battery, since we had spent the day tootling around, reported only 7 percent.
I couldn’t find an electric outlet anywhere around the gate at which we were waiting, so, in some desperation, I walked into a clothing store near the gate and asked if they knew of any places to plug in.
And, amazingly, the woman who ran the store invited me to plug my phone into an outlet she found somewhere in the middle of the floor of her store.
It seemed an imposition. But she insisted she did not mind.
That I would not have predicted. That was the first surprise—a pleasant one.
Touched by her generosity and without her applying any pressure whatsoever, I tried to find something to buy in her store and finally settled on a black-on-white Hawaiian shirt, which seemed to fit and look okay.
The second surprise, an unpleasant one, arrived when, about an hour later I collected my phone, boarded the plane and turned the phone on. It was now only 4 percent charged. That outlet on the floor of the woman’s store not only hadn’t helped; it had cost me 3 percent.
Life, as is its wont, had thrown me a Sandy-Koufax, 12-to-6 curve.
Okay, I was being a bit overdramatic. But I did have a long night of flying ahead of me: with no movies or power outlets on this Kenya Airways plane, with a wife who rarely provides conversation on airplanes because she is usually asleep, and with essentially nothing to entertain me besides—yikes!—my own thoughts.
I realized it was not the fault of that kind woman.
I dutifully reminded myself that worse things have happened, though none came to mind at that particular moment.
And I did manage to scrounge up 20 or 30 percentage points of charge later that night in the Addis Ababa airport.
But I must admit I was no big fan of the unpredictability of life that night.
My attitude toward life’s vagaries, however, improved considerably the next morning in Nairobi.
I congratulated myself effusively for having brought along a bunch of the correct power adapters plus the wires to fit all of our many and varied devices. Indeed, by the next morning we were luxuriating in 90 to 100 percent charges on every one of our devices.
And then the last and largest unpredictable occurrence arrived: I put on that new Hawaiian shirt purchased in the Mahé airport, stood in front of a mirror in our Nairobi hotel and . . . wow! My wife, no great fan of the whole Hawaiian-shirt thing, even said that it was “not bad.”
It is now—entirely unpredictably—my favorite shirt.
Surprise!
