Time to think…about wrestling with life

“The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing, because an artful life requires being prepared to meet and withstand sudden and unexpected attacks.”
Marcus Aurelius, Meditations.

What challenges might you face today? When limbering up, what core strengths will help get you through?

It is the sudden and unexpected events in our lives that can take the wind out of our sails, or even leave us feeling winded as they upend us and send us crashing to the floor. And yet we pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off and start allover again.

Worse than the unexpected occurring is having no experience or capacity to react effectively to the unexpected. If you have a few ideas or options for dealing with a surprise, then it is a matter of how quickly you can orientate yourself to the problem and put your options into action. It is for this reason that reflective feedback and hypothetical scenario planning are important: we are surrounded by examples of reactions to challenging events. If we don’t take the time to examine them and consider how we might react in the future, we’ll be caught out again. There’s no need to be surprised by surprise.