Chapter 9

Off the Beaten Path: Coping With Challenges

“The central problem of our age is how to act decisively in the absence of certainty.”

—Bertrand Russell

Ours, of course, is not a world of certainty, and acting decisively within it can definitely be a challenge. Even so, some situations may appear to be considerably less certain than others—if only because we face those situations infrequently, and have not built up a series of habitual reactions for dealing with them.

Job interviews. Personal crises. Grooming emergencies. Questions about medication in the workplace. Announcements concerning pregnancies. These are not the types of problems that show up on our typical morning’s to-do list. All the same, they are challenges that, despite their ...

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