Life’s Hammer

~ Mark

There’s no avoiding it — it’s like death and taxes — sooner or later the shit will hit the fan and something unpleasant will enter your life. It’s as sure as they day you were born. And while we can undertake a life of mitigation and risk avoidance, sometimes it just feels like it was going to happen no matter what we did. Spending one’s life finding ways to avoid life’s hammer seems sensible enough and we all do it to varying degrees. But if we accept that the hammer is coming for us all eventually regardless of what we do to avoid it, shouldn’t we at least be doing something to prepare for it? And when it does hit, what should we do to recover from the blow? These are worthy questions. These are the questions I explore with clients each and every day.

The hammer comes in many forms — getting passed over for promotion,  not getting that dream job, being made redundant, watching your industry being reduced by an emerging one, sickness, marital problems, death. Some of these blows, and other blows are likely to strike us all at least once in our lives. So what can we do? Anything?

Well, yes and no. There are avoidance strategies that we all undertake in the hope of avoiding these and other potential blows. But we must accept that we cannot avoid all of life’s hardships. So we must do more to prepare ourselves for them. We will talk more about that later. For now it is good for us to be mindful of what I’ve just described. Between now and when you die there will be some unpleasantness entering your life. I’m sorry, but that’s just the way life is. What we need to do is embrace that reality and begin to think about how much of your life you wish to invest in avoidance. How much of your income do you want to spend on insurances, how many things do you want to turn down because of the risk of unpleasantness? How much of life’s possibilities will you deny yourself in the name of playing it safe? We all draw these lines in different places. Where do you want to draw yours? And while you think about ho wmuch of yourself you wish to invest in avoidance, think too about how prepared for the impact of life’s little disasters you really are. How do you respond when things don’t go to plan? Would you like to make some changes there?

Published by Mark

Like most people, I embarked on adulthood with a plan. Then life came along to remind me how silly most plans are. Life is random and both goes along with, and defies our plans. Like billions of others like me, I've learned this at the sharp end of life. But I am learning to live with it. So let's do what humans are good at and communicate with one another to make sense of this aspect of life.