Every day now, I do two things. I check for appealing job postings to get a feel for the market, to see when I’m ready to jump in with both feet. And I check the status of 2019-nCoV, aka the “Novel Coronavirus”, which literally has the potential to disrupt human civilization at a fundamental level. Kind of like 9/11 but an order of magnitude greater, not just in death toll, but the effect it could have on the way we live.
I know that sounds crazy but seriously, if 10% of the people in China die, and this thing spreads to the rest of the world, and we end up living on Earth, but with a new kind of flu that kills 5% of the people that get it – that ain’t exactly the same thing we had before and that’s my point this morning.
You see, these two things that I do every day, these two topics that are foremost in my mind, neither of these were even on my radar back on the morning of January 14, 2020. And yet, on that day I was laid off after fifteen years and two weeks later, 2019-nCoV became something different from just a weird SARS variant but something that could really strike home.
You just never know what’s going to happen.
Let me illustrate another way. Last Friday, I was alone in the house and decided to take a little time to move some stuff out of my office. Mostly junk. I moved it to the attic over my garage, which is accessible through a spare room in our house. It would make kind of a neat panic room, but still would provide no defense against Coronavirus. Anyway.
Because we don’t relish the thought of people breaking in to our house through the garage attic, there’s a door there that’s perpetually locked, and as I was humming to myself, carrying some old speakers into the attic to die, I heard it click behind me and realized I didn’t have my phone, my wife wasn’t there, and I was now stuck.
Click – and suddenly life’s different. New priorities, instantly.
Get it? I ended up pushing the attic door (one of those floppy wooden staircase access doors) down from the top, and let it slam down, and then it didn’t quite unfold right, so I had to sort of lower myself down, and as I hung there over my garage, trying not to fall and break my ass, alone in a place where I could easily be discovered thirty minutes later dead on the floor by my wife, I thought you just never know what’s gonna happen.
Anyway I dropped down, and everything was fine. I didn’t even bother telling my wife. But there it is. That’s life, that’s the truth of it. We go through our day and just about everything that happens is unprecedented, but we deal with it and then retcon our day so everything appears to have made sense or been part of a plan.
And when you find yourself hanging from your fingertips, looking to see if you can drop on the concrete without gouging a hole in your back by hitting the steps that didn’t unfold properly, you tend to just delete that event from the narrative because it doesn’t quite fit.
What was I talking about?
The moral of this story: live in the moment and don’t worry. As little Jimmy Altucher says, if you’re thinking about the future or the past, you’re time traveling, and no point in that.
Everything is gonna work out fine.
Later!