A few years ago, I had a bad experience: as I was riding a motorcycle with my wife, my wife’s purse was snatched. After realizing what happened (it took me a second or two), I tried to pursue the snatcher.
I was overcome with emotion. Worse, my wallet was inside my wife’s purse at that time.
Fortunately, I still had my rational mind with me. I thought to myself, “Wait, I can’t be too fast. Otherwise, we could have an accident and things would get way worse than this.” So I made sure that I could still control my motorcycle.
Sure enough, the snatcher was gone. He got my wife’s purse and my wallet. Fortunately, we didn’t get hurt.
After arriving at home, we made calls to the banks to block our cards (my cell phone was still with me; my wife’s was gone). We lost all of our cards along with the cash we brought. It was a Saturday and we had to wait until Monday before we could get new cards.
All these meant that for two days, we literally had no money except for a little cash we had at home. We weren’t even sure whether we could have our meals. We had to carefully arrange those.
In the end, though the snatcher was never caught, we got new cards and things went back to normal.
I learned some life lessons from this experience. Here they are.
1. Appreciate what you have.
Sometimes we don’t appreciate what we have until we lose it. I tend to do that and you might too. I need to remind myself not to take things for granted. Here are 14 simple things you could be grateful for.
2. Don’t put all your eggs in one basket.
Well, in my case, it’s actually “don’t put all your cards in one bag.” 🙂 Since the experience, I made sure that I left at least one card at home just in case.
What are the risks in your case? Make sure to spread them out.
3. Stay rational.
I’m grateful because I could still think rationally at that time. After losing our belongings, our lives went back to normal within days. But if an accident happened… I can’t even imagine that.
4. Stay positive.
When something bad happened, it’s easy to blame others. It’s easy to be disgruntled. Fortunately, my wife and I were positive. We were grateful for the worse things that didn’t happen. We saw the glass half full instead of half empty. Having a positive mindset really makes a difference in situations like this.
5. Take precautions.
Just because we stayed positive doesn’t mean that we didn’t learn our lessons. We took precautions to make sure that it doesn’t happen again or at least minimize the consequences.
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Those are the lessons I learned. Any thoughts? Feel free to share them in the comments.
We had a similar experience and your recommendations are spot on! I believe the most important thing is you leave items at home or someplace safe, so you have your ‘fall back’, just in case. I ended up buying a runners belt so when I travel, I put important items in there and copies of ID in my bag. Most important, stay positive and don’t do anything that could jeopardize your well-being. “Stuff” can be replaced. You cannot.
Great advice. Thanks for sharing, Betty!
Hi ,
Very good informative sharing .
Intelligent people will learn from others experience and get benifit in life . Keep it up.
Thanks
Thanks for the kind words!
Very relevant post. It is always essential to think things through and have an action plan if something like this happens. Imagine if this had happened if one was travelling abroad. Not only would there be no cash and cards, you would need to call your card issuing banks on international dialing (assuming you remembered all the card numbers you lost!).
Yeah, I was fortunate that it happened in my hometown. I agree that having an action plan is important. Thanks!
I agree l believe that we must appreciate what we have like our healthy . such as me l never appreciate what i have like my healthy . But i must appreciate of god for my healthy . I hope i abandon this bad habit .
Health is a great gift indeed. I’m also learning to appreciate it.
Experience is the BEST teacher!
Yes, it is!
Hi Donald, thank you for sharing.
I found a lot of wisdom from your post. I feel like you really encapsulated a lot of elements of life and what we go through in life in such a simple yet powerful story.
I’m learning lots just by reading your posts; thank you very much Donald. I hope I can improve my own blog by applying what I learned here – power of story-telling.
My pleasure, Seneca! I still have a lot to learn myself. Keep moving forward with your blog!