Had a moment recently in which it appeared as if one of the big chutes in the great game of chutes and ladders was soon to open up under my feet. I learned a lot from my reaction to that. You have to have equanimity, whatever the danger or the event. I understood that truth very clearly two or three years ago, but it appears that the equanimity might have slipped a little in the interval. The uses of adversity are sweet, but it takes a conscious effort to make them part of your life. Working on it.
From cultural reasons, there is a prevailing sense that a life is not properly lived unless you enter into the melodrama of it, and really feel the event. As someone with a conservatory master's degree in acting who has played 19th c. melodrama professionally in the city (the play subsequently became popular, but not due to our production), I can vouch for the fact that this intuitive approach to life bears little resemblance to the experience of actual melodrama, and likely comes from a completely different source. Actual melodrama requires an absolute clarity, not the muddle of fears that make up most of modern experience.
You must maintain equanimity with respect to these chutes and ladders. It's possible that, in the fullness of time, both the chutes and the ladders will get very strange indeed. Determination, regardless of the event.
Two quick cultural references. First, C.P. Snow's dictum that there are two types of people in a crisis, those whose faces go pale, and those whose faces go red with passion, and it's better to have the first type in charge. Second, the anecdote (perhaps in Chambers Book of Days, perhaps elsewhere) about the first sighting of the Spanish Armada. News was rushed to the waiting forces, but Raleigh (I think) was engaged in a game of lawn bowling. The breathless messenger arrived with the news. Raleigh's (?) response, essentially: "We'll finish this game first." And they did.