Ship Happens

Speaking of travel docs, there is a phrase among experienced cruisers: "Ship Happens." That is, things don't always go as expected; put up with it.

A good principle for life, says I; we could do a lot worse.

On the ship, we have to put up with weather conditions that force us to miss ports, or do them in reverse order. It’s possible the entire itinerary may be changed without warning. Sometimes the kitchen runs out of things near the end of the cruise, from ice cream to the lobster you really, really want.

In life, it can rain on the day you had set for a picnic in the park. Somebody got sick at the most inconvenient moment. Your television broke down at the start of a long weekend. These, and other disasters, don’t happen at planned moments.

Ship Happens. You learn to adjust your expectations so they are more in line with the existing conditions. As much as I’d love to be the center of the universe, my desires paramount, it’s not going to happen. There are too many billions of other people with the same idea and there are also too many things that just go wrong.

When I got to the age where I realized the world does not revolve around me, life became more understandable. Things made sense. Ship Happens not only to me, but also to everyone else in the world.