It’s what we say when we never saw it coming: it came outta nowhere. The truck that speeds through the intersection, the flowers from a colleague you thought was platonic at work, the death of someone ‘taken too soon’, the proposal on the beach. Surprise can be devastating, alarming, joyful, and rapturous. It is, in many ways, deeply human because we are narrative creatures.
Surprise is a function of the narratives we build for ourselves about ourselves. Whether we know it or not, we’re all writing future chapters of our story based on the life we’ve lived so far. We say things like, “At 65, I’ll retire and travel the world.” Or, “At 35, I’ll have a husband and child.” Or, “In 3 years time, I’ll be Vice President of my company.” Or, “I’m getting a cricket bat for Christmas from Santa.”
Writing the future helps us understand where we are now and also provides something to look forward to. In some cases, these expectations can give us a reason for doing what we do today: I’ll drink that green smoothie now so I’m more prepared to run a marathon in 6 months time.
But our story is not ours alone to write. The truck that speeds through the intersection, someone taken too soon, the flowers from a colleague, the marriage proposal; these are all actions taken by others that necessitate the re-writing of our own story; a story that needs to be re-written to accommodate the pain or joy that ‘came outta nowhere’.
Grief, it seems, is a response to this narrative re-direction. We were ‘supposed’ to be travelling the world with a loved one in retirement but now we find ourselves alone because of that truck at the intersection that ‘took her too soon’. That’s not the way it was supposed to be. Now what do I do?
Thinking about our futures as unwritten stories may then, be helpful in dealing with those surprises in life: My life is a loose plot, but I wonder where the supporting characters of my story will take me. And yes, those paths carved into our story by others may mean that the path we saw for ourselves is no longer available to us, but that doesn’t make the story worse, just different. We still get to take the next step, to write the next page, to approach the future curiously – I wonder what will happen to this person, me, next.