steer into the skid

The flu and pneumonia are bad this year, some have said the worst it’s ever been.  We’ve seen stories on the news of the fatalities – in fact, a woman I work with had a 48 year old friend that died from complications of the flu.  She went to his funeral earlier this week.

I was surfing the net trying to keep busy and awake on a slow, gloomy day at work and came across a story about one of these fatalities.  The headline intrigued me – ’12-year-old girl dies unexpectedly, family comforted by letter she wrote herself’.  This story went somewhat viral – you may have seen it on.   My heart just sank for the family as I started to read the article.  One day their daughter had some cold symptoms,  tested negative for the flu, was going to be okay, and then died from pneumonia – I can’t imagine the shock.

While going through her things after Taylor died, her parents came across a letter she had written her future self to be opened and read by her ten years later – she would’ve been 22.  Some of what she wrote was pretty typical and expected of a 12-year-old girl – how are you?  Congratulations on graduating high school.  How’s college?  But something in the closing of the letter struck a chord with her parents, and a statement that we can all learn something from.  She wrote, ‘Stuff has happened good and bad, that’s just how life works and you have to go with it.’

Indeed it does, Taylor – and thanks for the reminder.  Bad things happen in life, just as often as the good.  Bad things happen to good people, good things happen to bad people, and it leaves you questioning the logic and existence of karma.  Her message is something I like to call ‘steering into the skid’.  Struggles and life obstacles are inevitably going to happen that are out of your control, but it’s how you react to them that matters.  You can fight it, which I found makes things worse.  Or, instead, you can go with it, make the best of it, smile, and ‘steer into the skid’.  In Mrs. Semen’s (yes, that is truly her name and I even giggle today as I type it) driver’s ed class, we were taught when our car fishtails, starts to hydroplane, or skids we turn into the direction of the skid instead of the opposite direction.  Sure, steering in the opposite direction might be our instinctive reaction, but it makes the situation worse and can cause a bad accident.  Although it seems like a dangerous choice, and once that seems wrong, you steer into the direction of the skid to level things out and get on track again.

So my message to you all is this.  When life throws you a curveball, accept the plot twist as a challenge a move on.  As a popular ecard states, ‘No matter what life brings you, kick some grass over that shit and move on.’  And most importantly, steer into the skid.