Shit happens

You get up in the morning and follow your usual routine which may include ablutions, coffee, tea, exercise; whatever you feel is necessary to get your day started on the right foot. Whatever your routine may be, it is most likely safe and predictable. For example you might walk your dog, have some breakfast, shower, dress for the day, catch the bus and go to work, all very safe, predictable and repetitive. You don’t expect anything to go wrong with your morning routine, it has become second nature to you, and some of us even accept it as a prediction to the sort of day we are going to have.

If your morning routine is marred by accidents and mishaps you feel that “this is not my day”, or “this day is not starting out right”.  Let’s say that your morning routine starts with your dog chasing the neighbor’s cat up a tree, a fallen coffee grinder that scatters grounds in places you never knew existed in your kitchen, your favorite shirt is in the hamper and you miss your bus. As you sit there waiting for the next bus you consciously or subconsciously brace for a bad day. The question that I propose here is whether a bad day is inevitable at this point, are these events foretelling of the sort of day it will be, or are they unrelated events separate from the progression of what remains of the day? The way I see it there are three different schools of thought on this subject: destiny, creation and pragmatic.

The destiny argument is that our destinies are written by some sort of superior power? It is preordained, somewhere in the universe it was written that Joe Blow would have a bad day on this day. It’s inevitable and you see the cat, the grounds, the shirt and the bus as warning signs of providence and prophecy.   Your destiny was written in the stars, or whatever parchment of your choice, and can’t be changed.  Your horoscope, tarot cards and crystal ball have already decided that this is to be a bad day. All you can do is prepare for the inevitable.

The creation argument suggests that you create your own reality; you are doomed to have a bad day simply because you’ve braced yourself for one.  Somewhere in your mind you have already thought “this is not going to be a good day” and with that attitude you then attract negativity to yourself. You create your own reality and the chance events of the morning plant the suggestion of a bad day.  All of your subsequent actions during the day will have an aura of that expectation of a failure. Subconsciously you expect failure and your conscious self is happy to oblige. You actually create a reality for yourself of a bad day. This is a self fulfilling prophecy, if the prophecy of a bad day had never been suggested by the marred morning routine, you would never have created that subconscious expectation and your day would have progressed normally. The creation subscriber is going to buy some self help books that teach how to control the subconscious, create your own reality and be very successful.  It’s all in the visualization, the mind’s eye and allowing the visions you create to enter into your reality, or something like that.

And then there is the pragmatic argument.  Dogs chase cats, coffee spills, your lazy ass didn’t do the laundry and didn’t move fast enough to catch the bus. Well, if you don’t like to start your day this way leash your stupid cat chasing dog, pay attention to what you’re doing, do your laundry and get your lazy ass out of bed a few minutes earlier. The pragmatist will not read the horoscope, buy the self help book and will have whatever sort of day is ahead of him, knowing full well that shit happens. It just does, stop reading more shit into it.