Prepared to be Unprepared?!

About a week ago my daughter’s school had swim session on a Thursday and I missed it! I missed keeping the swim suit in her bag and she ended up in her class while her friends waddled in the pool.

God! did I feel guilty?! And my daughter, the little monster that she is, made it worse for me by rattling it off to her father in the evening “Mumma forgot my swimsuit and XX, YY, ZZ all went to the pool but I had to play in the class with blocks”. I was so near tears…! And then I thought to myself, WHY!

Remember that one time that you went to school to take your exams and realized that the exams were for Physics and not Math as you’d imagined!!

And then there was a time when the teacher (wickedly!) smiled and announced a “Surprise” test on dates in History!

I am sure everyone has gone through at least one school day where you missed out on your “Homework Assignment”.

I am sure that all of this will rarely happen to the children today. And the reason is not that they are too attentive or too smart to mess up things. It is simply because they are hyper connected… or let me correct myself here, their parents are hyper connected! Look at yourselves. If you are a parent you are definitely on atleast ONE whatsapp group of parents (play school / play dates / class group / soccer group)!! And each of these groups messages @40 messages per hour. And dare you miss any!!

Was it so bad back then? If I look in hind sight, the unpreparedness worked in my favour.

1)   It made me prepare myself in a jiffy for the shock / surprise that came in. I had no option but to “get prepared” in what little time that I had. I caught on to make the most of the situation.

2)   I understood, in whichever small way, that I cannot ALWAYS plan. I am going to be in for surprises and I might as well stay prepared for it beforehand. Like, studying consistently rather than when tests were announced so that the worst that happened to me was “get low scores” and not flunk!

3)   I am human and I will miss out on things… may be forget to keep my assignment in my bag or completely forget doing it some time. But at all times, I needed to figure out how to manage the “miss”.

Before we jump the gun and announce that being tardy (at work/school) or missing out on important announcements is not what smart people do; THINK. It happens to the smartest of us.

And what we possibly need to appreciate is that

(1) we need to sometimes let it go and not work towards being prepared all the time… but be prepared to face things when you are caught unprepared! – READ again, it makes sense!

(2) we need to clarify ownerships (your kids e.g. should take ownership for missing something / forgetting and not smartly blame it on Mumma everytime!)

We are only human and missing out on some information or forgetting something is alright, sometimes. Why are we so hard on ourselves… hyperconnectivity works both ways!