Some people like spontaneity, adventure and surprise whilst others prefer things to be more ordered, planned and prepared. Prepared... I used to be a boy scout and a cub scout before that. "Be Prepared" was the motto and an example of that was that we always used to tape a twenty cent piece inside our caps or hats in case we needed to make a phone call. (I'm giving away my age here.) Some of that must have taken hold since, when I was out of uniform, I was always conscious of carrying about some change so that I could always make that phone call. Most people hate carrying change, I used to make a point of it. It irked my sister that change was always jingling in my pocket. At a church camp one year, she laughed and rolled her eyes because everyone was doing a morning exercise class silently, except me. I was doing the jingly star jumps...
Walking through the city one day, I needed to make that phone call. The first call I made reached an answering machine which cost me my thirty cents. Yes, inflation had taken it's toll by then. That wasn't a problem, because I was prepared and had another thirty cents; it takes more than two coins to jingle. My next call reached someone who wan't home, but someone else who could take a message was. This wasn't helping. Fortunately, the situation I was in resolved itself without my help and I was left with a sixty cent thought. How much change should I really carry in order to be prepared? Should cub scouts tape a roll of ten and twenty cent pieces in their caps, protruding to look antennae? How prepared was being prepared? If I phoned ten numbers that turned out to be uphelpful and was unable to dial an eleventh, was that being unprepared or was that just unlucky?
At the end of last year, I was operated in hospital for a Cerebral Cavernous Hemangioma that in fact caused a delay in the original scheduling of my SRS. Cerebral Cavernous malformations affect only 0.5% of the population worldwide and of those, 75% experience related medical symptoms[1]. That makes me part of a unique 0.375% of the population and that's only for all related medical symptoms, not necessarily only the serious ones. When my doctor says that it's not usual for my condition to have occurred so quickly and so seriously, I think I'm becoming more unique. Something you never want your doctor to say while he's examining you is, "That's interesting..." and having yourself filmed so that he can show how interesting you are to his students which makes you feel even more special. I don't know the odds right now, so let's stick with the original 0.375% even though we all know I'm more special that.
Of course, we all know that I'm transsexual and that makes me really special in more ways than one. Determining the incidence of transsexualism is difficult, but drawing upon a report by someone who is trying to show that it is more common that officially recognised[2] (Oh! I want to be more special!!), I'll pick the figure of 1 in 500 or 0.2%.
Now, assuming that my hemangioma is unrelated to being a transsexual (any of you ts's out there also have one of these?), then I'm special to the tune of 0.375% x 0.2% = 0.00075% of the population. Oh, did I mention I also have a totally unrelated herniated disc in my lower back? Not really uncommon, but combine that with what we have here and I'm literally your one in a million unlucky guy. Throw in the acute appendicitis I had and you actually have a better chance of winning the lottery than having all the unrelated medical afflictions I've had and that's not even the end of my medical history. How the hell do you prepare for that??
But I didn't need to do the maths or even hear about my hemangioma to begin to believe that you can't plan for everything and in my uni days, I developed a taste for adventure, spontaneity and learning to accept surprises instead of trying to assert control. I loved nature and the wilderness and, if I hadn't been so lazy in not getting out as often as I would have liked, I would probably have been like Sean Penn's character in the film Into the Wild and I'd probably have died out there from some accidental event. Perhaps that's my subconscious defence for being lazy, it actually saved my life. Lol!
Unfortunately, year after year in the corporate world (albeit trying to stay in the technical side) groomed that out of me. Corporations don't like surprises, they like to plan and believe they can control. Several project plans, Gantt charts, risk analyses and matrices, career plans and goals later, I fell into the trap of thinking I could control everything that happened to me too. In a twist of irony, not long after thinking that all that planning was paying off, that I was the master of my destiny and that my career was going where I wanted, I found myself booted out of the industry, unwanted and unable to get a job. How someone in the IT industry with 10 years experience including time as a project leader can find themselves unable to find another job is a really long story, so I won't go into it now except to say that it left me devastated. Clinically, majorly depressed. Candidate for ECT depressed. I declined that treatment, by the way, even though my doctor strongly recommended it. Somehow, I didn't really want to undergo sessions of several hundred watts of electricity being pumped into my brain to induce seizures that were supposed to help depression even though they didn't know why...
To make a really long story just slightly long, it was during that time that I came to realise that control is an illusion. You can't control what happens to you, you can only really control how you react and behave. I still have a thing for Stephen Covey's 7 habits though, so I do believe you can influence what happens to you but you can't control it. It's an important distinction. Given that acceptance, I relearned to not fear surprise but to embrace it and my sense of adventure slowly returned. "It is what it is", said a friend of mine several times one day. Good words to live by.
Adventure is in my spirit and in everything I do, even in city life. I don't need to know the exact directions of where I'm going, much less know that I'm taking the most efficient route, before I being the journey. I do have a map in the car which I can look at if I get lost and, in the worst case, I could always ask for directions. Even if I get lost and spend double the time driving around, I don't really mind unless it makes me late for an appointment. I don't need to know what's in my food before I eat it, as long as it looks ok. I hate spiders, so I'd have trouble eating Cambodian deep fried spiders, but otherwise I think I'm doing all right. This proves useful in foreign countries or when trying new and foreign cuisines where you might not have even heard of half the ingredients or even be able to read the menu. However, I find it exciting. Maybe I'll discover a new favourite food that I hadn't know existed before and the variety and anticipation of what I'll get is invigorating. At worst, I'll not like it or throw up and have to buy something at another shop.
Some people like to seek guidance in certain situations which isn't a bad thing. It may help to prepare you, knowing that ordering the "Fong Jao" at yum cha will net you a small basket of braised chicken feet (my favourite, by the way). It's good to know that in some asian countries, you need to bargain for the prices at certain places to avoid paying twice what you could. It's even better to know how much a taxi fare might cost you in Thailand in case the meter in the taxi mysteriously fails and he wants to charge you double what it would normally cost.
Ultimately though, knowledge and preparation are good things but even better is the ability to just enjoy the journey; even if it does take you to a different destination.
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[1] http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/cerebral-cavernous-malformation and my doctor said the same thing too.
[2] http://ai.eecs.umich.edu/people/conway/TS/TSprevalence.html
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