Why be surprised?

Being surprised by the action of people or events has a cost function. More often than not the 'unconscious creep' seeps in and if you allow it, through lack of awareness, it becomes an echo chamber of distraction. Put simply, people go over and over an issue without any clear plan how to deal with it or a remote chance to make a difference.

You would expect people to make sense of the world, put simply, there are things you can control and things you can not control. To make a difference, a significant time, resource and energy commitment is required to increase the probability of effecting change as there are no guarantees. The question is where do you want to spend this time and energy and on what?

That is why, in my opinion, a stoic approach is one to consider.

Ryan Holiday, Author of 'The Obstacle is the way', put it very succinctly:

"It doesn’t matter what we’re talking about, or who, the reality is that life is going to be filled with baffling events and baffling people. You better get used to it.

Marcus Aurelius knew this. He reminded himself in Meditations how fruitless it was to go around asking why. It doesn’t matter why things happened the way they did. It doesn’t matter whose fault it was. "Nothing is more pathetic,” he wrote, “than people who run around in circles, 'delving into the things that lie beneath,' and conducting investigations into the souls of the people around them."

All this is a distraction. It’s a distraction from what’s at hand. It’s a distraction, he said, from the real power that you have—over yourself, over what you do."

So the question is, what will you be distracted by? Events and people who serve you, all those events or people who don't?

Matt Englund