The only thing you can control, most of the time, is your reaction to the stresses you are under.  

“Mmm…,” she said, “that sounds reasonable.  But what if you put yourself, by poor planning or sheer impracticality and wishful thinking,  directly into the jaws of the situation that’s causing you the stress you’re under?”

Even more self-control is required then.  That anyone could say, with the assured wisdom of hindsight, that your plan– or lack of a plan, would have inevitably put you between these stressful jaws eventually, nostrils filled with the deadly breath of the beast intent on devouring you and your spirit — is not the issue.

“What is the issue?” 

I think of Michael Holden, a new kid with blond hair who was in my class in fourth grade.   The desks that week were arranged in a horseshoe and Holden and I sat, with about half the class, with our backs against the windows.   Which now that I think about it, put us dangerously in the path of strafing Communist planes, which, during the Cold War, we sometimes did drills to avoid the bullets of, should they come screaming in.

We were reviewing a math homework assignment and the teacher was going around the horseshoe in order, calling on a kid to read the answer to the class.  We would all check our work and then pass the page in for the teacher to make notations on and hand back to us the following day.   It was pretty asinine, as many things were back then, but easy enough, and all in a day’s work.  

The assignment was to teach us about making reasonable mathematical estimates.   We were asked to estimate the answer, then work out the math problem and give both the estimate  and the actual answer.  The first kid said “the estimate is ten, the actual answer is 12.5”.  The second kid used the same formulation, as did the third and every other kid.  

I counted around the horse shoe and counted the questions to see which one I’d be called on to give the answer to.  I worked out the estimate and the answer, it took a moment.  Meantime, I kept filling in the estimates and answers my classmates were kindly providing, cleverly getting one or two wrong and dutifully marking an X next to those, along with the correct answer.

Holden, I saw, was struggling somehow, either didn’t count right or didn’t get the assignment, or… I don’t know.  But when the teacher called on him he had a blank loose leaf page in front of him, which he stared at thoughtfully.   

“The estimate,” he said, and began to cough.  “The estimate is,” and he was convulsed in what the Russians used to call a paroxysm of coughing.  He struggled to get the word ‘estimate’ out again, as his cough became more and more like a dog’s bark.  He was fair-skinned and his face quickly turned pink, then red, then crimson, almost purple.

“Michael,” the teacher called in concern, “go get a drink of water!”  And he dutifully nodded, still coughing, got up and walked to the back of the room where he drank at length from the water fountain at the end of the long sink.  Another kid gave the estimate he hadn’t provided, and the actual answer.  The teacher never got back to Holden.  

And there’s the buzzer.