Don’t be surprised by surprises

The outgoing British government is throughly surprised. It came in on a landslide in 2019; it exits on an even stronger landslide in 2024. In 2019 the opposition Labour Party looked like it could be marginalised forever, so bad was its defeat. This time round it has a super-majority. Surprise!

Life is a capricious beast. Surprises are everywhere. We are, all of us, often caught with jaws wide open because we just didn’t see something coming. Surprises come in all sizes, from the mundane to the life-altering. You have been surprised many times in your life, as have I.

When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, people on both sides were surprised, Germans East and Germans West. It was a seismic shift, but few at the time would have told you it was coming. It was a surprise that changed the course of history.

When Apple was close to bankruptcy the late 1990s, few analysts could have told you that it would come back from that near-death experience and then unleash a posse of products that would take it to world domination a decade later.

Kenyan banks did not see M-PESA coming. They ignored it, then dismissed it, then fought it, and finally made peace and allied with it. They were throughly surprised, and had to learn a new and unfamiliar dance in response.

Right now, Kenyan politicians are thoroughly surprised. The country’s tax protests by Gen Z have morphed into something far more profound, in just a matter of days and weeks. Politicians of all stripes are left flummoxed and tongue-tied. How to deal with this strange movement, not aligned with any political overlord, not led in any traditional manner, not minding the usual protocols, and seemingly unconstrained by that traditionally reliable Kenyan enclosure, the tribe?

Surprises are inevitable. So what is to be done?

In his book The Psychology of Money, author Morgan Housel quotes the renowned behavioural psychologist Daniel Kahneman. The professor once gave the following advice to investors who had made wrong forecasts: “What you should learn when you make a mistake because you did not anticipate something is that the world is difficult to anticipate. That’s the correct lesson to learn from surprises: that the world is surprising.”  

Housel goes on to advise that we should understand that the events that shake the world—that move the needle the most—are inevitably things that will surprise us. We won’t be prepared, and we have to live with that. Expect the unexpected has become a cliche, but it’s a fundamental truth.

In living in a world full of surprises, some things are really important. The first is to not be rigid and unadaptable. If you are stuck in your ways, every surprise will leave you unstuck. We must accept the inevitability that surprises will arrive and change the way we do things.

The second lesson is to be a deep-rooted tree, one that can bend with strong winds and bounce back. An individual’s deep roots are many: strong relationships; calm demeanour; physical and mental wellbeing; financial buffers; and faith in a higher purpose. Those must be cultivated all our lives. Without them we will be alone, fragile, excitable, and resentful. We will be ready to be shattered.

Next: surprises may be surprising, but that doesn’t mean we can’t see anything coming. Knowledge is power, and helps us to spot trends and patterns before they become apparent to all. We may not be able to make detailed predictions, but we can pay attention to whiffs and whispers in order to get inklings and glimmers of the surprises to come.

But perhaps the best way to deal with surprises is to cultivate a philosophical approach to them. If we see life’s wobbles as the universe’s way of keeping us on our toes, then we can accept them as growth opportunities. Every surprise, every mistake, every failure is information. If we can harness that information and use it to our advantage, we get stronger, not weaker, after every surprise.

Many spiritual traditions ask us to accept the transient nature of life. Impermanence is our lot; nothing lasts. Knowing this helps us to stay calm and composed in the face of the ebbs and flows of our existence. It is the refusal to accept impermanence that brings pain. The Stoics tell us to focus only on that which we can control, and stay equanimous in the face of bewilderments. If we remain grateful for having this life regardless of its many jolts, we can take anything that comes. Life is always a journey, never a destination. The mistake we make is to regard different milestones as final destinations. We must rest briefly and move on—and the path ahead is always uncharted.

And yet. When all is said and done, we must not let life’s astonishments make us timid. To be alive is to keep receiving curveballs—but we must remain willing to swing for the fences.

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