No one gets through their allotted span without a major off-script event. Something, somewhere, will go catastrophically wrong. Not potentially, or incidentally, but necessarily, because of the structure of human existence and of our appalling exposure to error, accident, madness and illness.
Someone very important to us will die long before they should, in horrific and entirely unexpected circumstances.
We’ll suffer a significant reversal in professional life, probably triggered by a folly on our part, an entrenched character flaw or a collision with one of the very sharp edges of the business cycle. A central relationship will go wrong: a child will develop a major grievance, someone whom we trusted 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 committedly 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 the quieter stretches. ‘To philosophize is to learn to die,’ knew Montaigne, and he might have added, to be more all-encompassing, to suffer too. Expecting the unexpected horror is the one move we can make to insulate ourselves a little from the vengefulness and wickedness of Fortune.
…..the script we are holding is a sentimental lie. We are in fact following that path that all humans must walk.
