Not All Surprises Are Bad
An abrupt realignment of expectations.
In my favorite television show, Mad Men, little Sally Draper tells her father that she thought her new baby brother was supposed to be a girl. Her dad replies, “I thought you were going to be a boy.” He then reassures her with a smile that “Not all surprises are bad.”
Most people don’t like surprises because they deliver an abrupt realignment of expectations. As Pema Chödrön teaches us in Comfortable With Uncertainty, each of us has a story we tell ourselves about who we are and how we fit into the world. That story represents our mental model of how the world works, and we rely on that model to navigate life. We come to expect events to unfold according to our model.
When we experience surprise, it means some event has violated our mental model. It is evidence that the story we’ve been telling ourselves about who we are and how we fit into the world is wrong—at least a little bit. This can be disconcerting.
Or a surprise can be a reminder that we don’t know everything. A surprise can provide an opportunity to re-evaluate the story we tell about ourselves, update our mental model to account for the unexpected, and subtly adapt how we approach navigating our lives. We can greet surprises as invitations to better understand our universe and get closer to The Unknowable Truth.