My daughter comes home from Costa Rica today, where she has been spending a month working at an animal sanctuary and doing a bit of travelling. All month I have been worried about her and have been immensely relieved to get her daily updates. Once, she didn’t contact us for two days and I feared the worst, but it turned out she had no Wi-Fi for that period. I knew she had friends with her and that they would have let me know if something had happened, but I still worried.

My main concern was that she would have her phone stolen. Like many of us, her whole life is on her phone. Not only is it her means of staying in contact with the world, but her flight tickets and all her travel information were on it. She didn’t lose her phone, but she did get marooned on an island overnight!

We had planned for her losing her phone and knew she was not too far from the British Consulate in San Jose. We had contacted a friend of a friend who lives in Costa Rica and on whom she could call if things went wrong. We knew she was travelling with friends who would look after her.

One thing which didn’t occur to me was that she would come home with severe food poisoning. For twenty-four hours we were not sure if she would be able to fly home on her scheduled flight but fortunately, she has recovered enough to be able to fly,

They say that life happens while you’re thinking of something else. I saw a meme the other day that said, ‘The epitaph on my tombstone should read, “Well, that didn’t go as planned.’” We think we have covered everything and then life throws a curve ball at us.

What do we do when we are faced with something unexpected, something we hadn’t planned for? After a moment of stunned disbelief, how to we react?

Some of us deal with the unexpected, especially emergencies, with a cool head and some of us panic.

I am blessed with a cool head in emergencies, although I go to pieces afterwards. I also tend to plan for the worst and hope for the best, whereas my husband is an eternal optimist. Having said that, he too deals with the unexpected with a pragmatic outlook. For those twenty-four hours I checked my daughter’s travel insurance and decided we would pay the additional airfare for her travelling companion so he could stay with her. We prepared for her to go into hospital if necessary. We even looked into flights for my husband to go out to her if needed.

Thankfully, all is well, and she is on her flight home, but she might not have been.

What has life thrown at you that was unexpected and how did you deal with it? Looking back, are you proud of yourself, or do you wish you had handled it differently?

Mary

A Moodscope member