There's Only One Guarantee in Life

People say there are only two guarantees in life - death and taxes.

I disagree.

I think there’s only one guarantee every single one of us has in life:

Things won’t always go your way.

That’s it. Period. Full stop.

Maybe that means death. Maybe it means taxes. But it also means the traffic on your way to work. The partner who broke up with you. The job you got laid off from. The argument you just had with your sibling. The unexpected bill you need to pay. The coffee that’s too hot. The pain in your knee.

From the life-altering to the itty-bitty everyday stuff, things will happen that you don’t like, didn’t ask for, and absolutely did not want.

That’s the guarantee.

Even death - which most of us see as the ultimate unwanted outcome - isn’t experienced the same way by everyone. Someone living with unbearable suffering may welcome the end of their life, while someone else may be desperately fighting for one more day.

Or losing a job even - it could devastate one person and liberate another. An ending can feel like a tragedy, a relief, or both at the same time. I remember being laid off from my first tech job 16 years ago. I was broken-hearted. Devastated to say the least. But once I walked out the door of the office building, I felt a strange sense of liberation and freedom.

What happens - events in life - is only one part of the experience. Our needs, circumstances, values, beliefs, and preferences all play a role in helping to determine whether we experience it as a cost, a payment, a relief, a loss, a gift, or something else entirely.

The event itself (what happens) isn’t the universal guarantee.

The universal guarantee is the eventual mismatch between what happens and what we want to happen.

What I want may be completely different from what you want. But neither of us will move through life without eventually encountering something we didn’t choose, don’t like, or desperately wish were different.

Life didn’t violate an agreement with you

When we believe life should consistently conform to our preferences, to the way we want things to happen, every disruption feels like a violation.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

They weren’t supposed to do that.

My life wasn’t supposed to turn out this way.

We resist not only what happened, but the fact that it was allowed to happen at all. That resistance consumes our attention, distorts what we see, and shrinks our available options. That’s why we sometimes feel stuck.

But life doesn’t unfold according to any one person’s preferences.

There are billions of us here, each wanting different things. The job I desperately want may be the same job you desperately want. The person I want to stay may want to leave. The decision that makes my life easier may make yours harder.

Life can’t possibly conform to everyone’s preferences because our preferences regularly conflict with one another.

So how the heck can everything possibly go everyone’s way?

It can’t. That doesn’t mean painful things don’t hurt. It doesn’t mean injustice is ok, grief disappears, or we shrug our shoulders while terrible things happen.

No.

It means something not going our way isn’t evidence that life has malfunctioned.

It’s part of life’s operating system. That’s how life works.

Acceptance changes our optionality

Once we understand that that’s just how life works, the disruptions that happen stop feeling like personal betrayals by existence.

It may still ducking suck. We may still grieve, rage, hurt, panic, or wish with every fiber of our being that things were different.

But we don’t have to remain stuck fighting the fact that it happened. We don’t have to spend all our energy demanding that the current state of affairs not be the current state of affairs.

That’s where acceptance enters.

Not approval.

Not resignation.

Not passivity or toxic positivity.

Acceptance is accurate interaction with reality.

This happened. I don’t like it. I wish it were different. And here it is. Now what?

I learned what that could look like in one of the most painful moments of my life.

On April 2, 2022, my then 25-year old daughter suddenly went into respiratory arrest. Within hours, she was on life support in a medically induced coma, experiencing multi-organ failure. The doctors told us to pray that she made it through the first 24 hours.

For days, we had no idea what was happening or what would happen next. Every update seemed to introduce a new complication, a new uncertainty, and a hundred new questions I couldn’t answer. My mind kept racing toward every possible outcome while the reality in front of me became harder and harder to process.

One night, when it all felt completely unbearable, my sister said, “One day at a time. Baby steps.”

Something about those words brought me back to what was actually happening.

Just today.

Just this moment.

What do we know right now? What can I do right now to influence the outcome?

Nothing about the situation became ok. My daughter was still in a coma. Her body was still in crisis. I was still terrified and in more pain that I knew how to contain.

But I could listen to the doctors. Ask questions. Verify what I was being told. Advocate for her. Accept help. Appreciate the nurses. Drink a cup of tea. Rest when someone else could sit beside her. Focus on the next decision instead of trying to solve an unknowable future.

Accepting the reality in front of me didn’t erase the pain.

It gave me access to my options.

Once we can see what’s actually happening, rather than remaining trapped in a fight with the fact that it’s happening, we can see more of what’s available to us. Our optionality changes.

We may not be able to change what happened. We may not like any of our choices either. But we can finally see that choices still exist.

We can grieve, ask for help, challenge what’s happening, adapt to it, walk away, take a stand, or simply focus on the next thing we can do.

The situation may not have changed. But what we can see, and therefore what we can do, has.

We regain access to our agency - our ability to choose how we respond, what we do next, and what we try to influence.

Agency doesn’t mean controlling the situation or guaranteeing the outcome. It means recognizing that even when we can’t change what happened, we still have a part to play in what happens next.

Sure, it may suck that no one asked us whether we wanted to be born into a life that operates this way.

But we’re already here.

We might as well understand how it works so we can meet it with more clarity, flexibility, and power.

Things won’t always go your way.

That’s not life malfunctioning.

That’s just life.

What you do when it doesn’t go your way is where your power lives.