Remarkably I persist in the ambition for smooth sailing.  I foolishly imagine that once I have wrestled the current dilemma to the ground there will be no others.  Can there be anything more preposterous!  This outrageous frame of mind can only be excused as a tolerable default, a starting point, the least offensive of the alternatives.  Nonetheless it abounds in marred logic and failed intellectualism, having the dubious merit of wishful thinking and Disneyland generally.

Whether however I would counsel others to contaminate their optimism by the perpetual spectre of impending doom is questionable.  Therein lies the rub – hope for the best but expect the worst!  Not exactly uplifting!

In any event the unvarnished truth is that no matter how well things are going or for how long, eventually the tide will turn.  More likely than not the euphoria of any one moment or day will be short-lived and it is reasonable to expect at least a hiccup along the way.  Which brings me to the point of my current contemplation; namely, I haven’t any dispute with the irregularity of life’s fortunes and indeed I clearly embrace its mercurial change.  Rather my focus is the adaptation to those anomalies.  It is oddly confounding that no one would argue against the unpredictability of life or the variation of its fortunes, but we are all strangely annoyed by its inconsistencies. This may be viewed as digestible but  it isn’t forward-thinking.

While I won’t suggest I have yet attained the elevated state of being able blithely to dismiss the infringement of life’s conundrums, I have at least developed the tact to market my distress as surmountable.  Ideally I aim to avoid being accusatory as that does nothing more than entrench people in an already corrupted situation.  The goal is to resolve the problem without entangling people’s sensitivities, either one’s own or others’.  I have no doubt that there personnel managers who would consider this stratagem as feeble and guileless.   I on the other hand prefer to think that modification by example will in the end have the same improving effect as “taking responsibility for one’s actions”.  Besides too often the bump in the road is not the fault of anyone in particular so the pursuit of blame is misplaced to overcome the difficulty.

The acid test of cleverness in these matters is whether one adopts at the outset of a downturn the commitment to resolve it.  This may sound trite but a moment’s reflection will disclose that frequently the knee-jerk reaction is to reject the intrusion and to cast blame which only succeed to obstruct the resolution.  What is required instead is to pause to consider not so much what has happened as what one would have preferred to have happened.  This immediately redirects the mind from a pointless adherence to the problem to a valuable contemplation of the answer.  The corollary of such distraction is the removal of the parties from the fray so to speak to a forum of faultless negotiation and strategy.

If all this sounds hopelessly strategic and diplomatic, it is!  Nonetheless it has the advantage of elevating one’s mind from the morass of far lesser preoccupations.  In that respect it is certainly a policy of deception.  It has been said that one only needs manners when the going gets tough and here the principle is the same.  Paradoxically the driving force when down in the dumps is the appearance of rising above it.  Human nature at times requires the bolster of heightened conduct.