…that you will be there.

Did you notice the photo in the hedder part of this blog?  I took that shot in December 2003, about 70 miles offshore from the Baja Peninsula of Western Mexico, four days into our cruise around the world.  The photo doesn’t do justice to the size of the waves or how violently they moved, and these were the little ones after the main event the night before.  This single storm pretty much slammed the door on what I had hoped would be a five year trip on our first cruising sailboat, Low Pressure.  In fact, we almost died.  Read a full account of the storm here.

Should we panic?

I took three lessons from that storm:

1. Don’t name a boat after an unsettled weather pattern.
2. Solid ground is your worst enemy when conditions get rough at sea.
3. Never worry about whether you can handle the future.

This post is about lesson #3

If you are a human being, you likely spend almost all of your time thinking about what will or could happen two minutes to two years ahead of right now.  How will my industry evolve?  Will I have a job?  Should we buy that house?  Will our child grow up healthy?  Will our investments appreciate?  What should I cook for dinner? Thinking about the future isn’t a bad thing in and of itself.  Imagining future outcomes has served homo sapiens quite well.  In fact, after reading the storm story, you might say that I could have done a better job of predicting possible outcomes before leaving San Diego, especially since I am a weather forecaster by trade.

What I learned from that storm is that trying to prognosticate about how I’ll handle future events (will I be able? can I? will I fail?, etc.) if the absolute worst case scenario comes to pass is absolutely pointless.  I can and will perform when the moment calls for it, and I won’t even have to think about it; I will do the right thing automatically.  Automatically.

Careful planning may keep you out of the most harrowing of situations (or it may not), but when the shit does hit the fan and all options run out, no amount of planning or strategizing will make survival any easier or more certain.  If the project falls apart, the business fails, the house gets foreclosed on, or if your child is born with problems, the right answer will appear every time.  No thought needed.

So at the end of the day, the one thing that I leave out of my future-casting?  Me.  I can trust myself to handle each wave as it comes.