“It was for the best,” Marcus Aurelius wrote to himself one evening. We assume this was after something negative happened. A setback on the battlefield, a diplomatic mission that failed, a friend got sick and had to cancel a trip they’d planned together. “Nature had no choice but to do it.”

We must remind ourselves of this same thing when the unexpected (and uncontrollable) happens to us. “It was for the best. So Nature had no choice but to do it.” What’s the point in questioning whether it was for the best? Whether it was fair? Whether it was somebody else’s fault? What matters is that it happened, and what matters is what we’re going to do about it. And our response will be better if you can begin to realize that the world is complicated and confusing but in the end it works out alright for us—if we let it.