Being well prepared makes me feel 😌

I have often wondered if I over prepare - if I have a tendency to carry too many things with me “just in case”. I aspire to minimalism, but I definitely fail to achieve it in practice. Indeed, it’s not rare for me to go on holiday and pack several items of clothes for situations which do not materialise, or simply to realise that I’ve been carrying some item in my backpack every day for several months while never using it.

Well, today I was very happy to have a random item in my backpack that had been sitting there unused for god-knows how long.

European Tilderinos are likely also looking forward to the imminent near-total solar eclipse. I‘ve been really looking forward to it, and my partner and I had made plans to rendezvous at a park in our city after to work view it. But as I go to leave work, I realise: (minor) disaster! I am an optically-impaired person (I need glasses), but since I did not put on my contact lenses this morning, I will have to wear my eclipse-goggles over my spectacles! What a fool I will appear to everyone else at the park!

…and then I remembered: I almost always make sure to have a spare pair of contact lenses in my most-used bags (I wear dailies, so it’s cheap to set a small handful of pairs aside for this purpose) such that if I have a contact lens emergency while I’m out, I can safely remove the problematic pair and replace them with a fresh pair. Of course I also usually carry around my glasses if I’m wearing my lenses, but this isn’t always practical, or it may be important for me to be able to resume wearing lenses (if I am to playing sports, for example).

Now you might wonder why this fact slipped my mind initially, that would be because I’ve been wearing contact lenses for well over a decade, and in the last five or so years I don’t think I’ve had a single incident. But I remain hopefully that a past version of myself may still have been practicing over-preparedness…

So, I go a-rummaging in my backpack and, lo and behold, I do indeed have a set of emergency contacts! Now I will be able to stare directly at the sun mildly more conveniently! Thanks, past me!

(Perhaps you can tell that this situation made my extremely happy, hence why I felt the need to share.)

Have a lovely solar eclipse day (to all who celebrate)!