A few years ago, I had a bad experience: as I was riding a motorcycle with my wife, my wife’s purse was snatched. After realizing what happened (it took me a second or two), I tried to pursue the snatcher.
I was overcome with emotion. Worse, my wallet was inside my wife’s purse at that time.
Fortunately, I still had my rational mind with me. I thought to myself, “Wait, I can’t be too fast. Otherwise, we could have an accident and things would get way worse than this.” So I made sure that I could still control my motorcycle.
Sure enough, the snatcher was gone. He got my wife’s purse and my wallet. Fortunately, we didn’t get hurt.
After arriving at home, we made calls to the banks to block our cards (my cell phone was still with me; my wife’s was gone). We lost all of our cards along with the cash we brought. It was a Saturday and we had to wait until Monday before we could get new cards.
All these meant that for two days, we literally had no money except for a little cash we had at home. We weren’t even sure whether we could have our meals. We had to carefully arrange those.
In the end, though the snatcher was never caught, we got new cards and things went back to normal.
I learned some life lessons from this experience. Here they are.
1. Appreciate what you have.
Sometimes we don’t appreciate what we have until we lose it. I tend to do that and you might too. I need to remind myself not to take things for granted. Here are 14 simple things you could be grateful for.
2. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Well, in my case, it’s actually “don’t put all your cards in one bag.” 🙂 Since the experience, I made sure that I left at least one card at home just in case.
What are the risks in your case? Make sure to spread them out.
3. Stay rational.
I’m grateful because I could still think rationally at that time. After losing our belongings, our lives went back to normal within days. But if an accident happened… I can’t even imagine that.
4. Stay positive.
When something bad happened, it’s easy to blame others. It’s easy to be disgruntled. Fortunately, my wife and I were positive. We were grateful for the worse things that didn’t happen. We saw the glass half full instead of half empty. Having a positive mindset really makes a difference in situations like this.
5. Take precautions.
Just because we stayed positive doesn’t mean that we didn’t learn our lessons. We took precautions to make sure that it doesn’t happen again or at least minimize the consequences.
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Those are the lessons I learned. Any thoughts? Feel free to share them in the comments.
