What are the chances?

This is something that struck me a few days ago. And it starts with the impossible.

Our local supermarket is expanding which means that various aisles are being moved around from one week to the next during the refurbishment. Sometimes our usual purchases are not there because the shelf is being moved. It may be in another part of the store or it might not be available at all.

Drea (my beloved) always gets our favorite wine from the supermarket in the weekly shop. (To be strictly accurate she gets my favorite wine and just goes along with my preference.) One week it was impossible to get our (my) usual wine. So she did what she thought best - picked another wine, with similar characteristics.

Guess what? The wine she found was better than the wine we had before. It was a pattern-break - we had broken the pattern we had established, and that is useful. As simple as it sounds it is important to keep your options open. It actually becomes a matter of simple maths. . .

If I try 'something new' - whatever it is (ethics, morals and personal values permitting) then I am statistically more likely to find something better. This is because with any choice the new thing can be either worse, as good as or better than the original.

If it is worse, well, I won't buy, do or get it again.

If it is as good as the original, then I have a backup or an alternative that I didn't know about before. If nothing else I've increased my potential for supply in the event of one or the other failing. I may have a resource which will be useful to myself or others later. I have an alternative tool in my toolkit.

And of course if it is better, then I have improved my prospects.

Thus, of the three possibilities, two of them leave me as good or better off than what I have now. Given that this represents a broadening of my options or an improvement in them the choice of trying something new is, therefore a 66% (two out of three) improvement.

Opening ourselves to new experiences (providing they are not directly detrimental to you) is therefore something which is to be embraced.

It also helps us keep a positive frame of mind when things don't go according to plan and we have to change how we go about things - the change of direction is more likely to be beneficial for us.