Today is one of those days that every sane person has from time to time. Today I have woken up and immediatelly felt dissatisfied with my life. You know, this world is cruel and unfair and all that, but the fact that the first thing that I have seen out of bed was by planked wooden floor waving from water damage really set the mood for the most of my morning.
Everyone has that baggage with them. Work obligations, mortgage, children to raise, appointments to keep. Some days a straw to break your back just catches up with you. It does not help at all, if you believe that you live your life doing your absolute best. You set yourself a set of principles to live by. You follow them through. And in the end, you are still, like the rest of them — alone in a boat at a mercy of the ocean. Things keep happening around you and you are powerless to contribute to the events in any meaningful way.
I believe in my rational thinking. I used to be very insecure and easily triggered, but in time I grew confidence in my abilities and started to be critical of what is thrown at me. I'm not perfect in controlling my own emotions, but I try. I can plan ahead. I even prefer to have time to sleep on any decision, unless I have previous experience and am familiar with consequences. I try to achieve perfection, but for personal benefit select the safest options. I can find a middle ground if needs be. All in all, when facing a decision I do everything right.
That's not a maximalistic statement, it's just a set of mind. No one does everything exactly right. But given this and that you better believe that you did the best you could. The absolute yet unachievable "right". It may seem in the moment, that if you are prepared and do everything in your power, you are somehow protected from any wrongdoing. That short of natural disaster or heavenly intervention there is nothing that can affect you in any measurable way. This is a fallacy. It's not even a Murphy's Law (though remembering it helps). You mentally put yourself in a state where you are so full of your righteousness that any incoming danger would be a complete shock.
"How could this happen to me?" you would ask. "I thought of everything, I did the safe thing, I surrounded myself with walls of logic and facts!" World does not work this way. So many things in your daily life are out of your personal control, that infallibility simply does not exist. You should absolutely try to do everything as right as you can. But you should not let yourself be fooled, that this would have an impact of the situation you are putting yourself in. It does sound obvious to a calm and reasonable mind, but in case of stress reason tends to flee first. It is helpful to have a reminder.