When Tragedy Strikes, Be Prepared
Have you spent your life carrying your own weight, handling your own affairs, fighting your own battles? And has it been worth the effort? I'd say yes. The day something goes badly wrong, you'll already know how to stand on your feet.
Picture this: everything in your life has rolled along smoothly, no real bumps, and then something awful lands on you. How would you hold up? I'm not wishing misfortune on anyone. But life isn't all peaches and cream, and if you quietly assume it will be, the disappointment hits twice as hard when a crisis arrives and you find you can't manage it.
There's a strange gift buried inside hard times. Trouble hands you a chance to learn something and to find out what you're actually capable of under pressure. Most people don't recognize it in the moment as an opening for growth. Yet it can push you into learning skills you never would have picked up otherwise, and sometimes it turns your whole direction around, occasionally for the better.
The rough patches in life add up, and they teach. Something that would have left you frozen and clueless the first time becomes familiar after a few rounds. Think about a brand new mother whose first baby comes down with the stomach flu, vomiting and diarrhea, the works. Now put that same mother in the same situation two years later, same child, same illness. By then she's seen it before, more than once, and she handles it with a calm she didn't have at the start.
You can go through life cushioned and protected, never forced to wrestle with the ordinary problems other people solve on their own. The cost is that it leaves you exposed when a genuine disaster finally shows up. Take an example from medical training. Say you're wrapping up your internship and applying for a residency, and the one hospital you set your heart on turns you down. Maybe they put you on a waiting list in case a slot opens up, in case an accepted applicant decides to go somewhere else.
Meanwhile, you never bothered to apply to the less appealing programs. Back then there was no computerized matching system, and each program had its own deadline, after which it stopped accepting applications. So the hospital you wanted passes you over, you're still parked on that waiting list, and by the time nothing has opened up, every other program has closed its doors. You've got nowhere left to go. That waiting list, as it happens, may have just been a polite way of saying no.
Had earlier experiences with school applications taught you to keep a backup, to apply in more than one place in case your first choice fell through, none of this would have caught you flat-footed. You'd already have applications in elsewhere the moment the odds started looking bad.