Today, I Hope you Stay

A short story about embracing the unexpected

4 min readJul 20, 2022

One of the nagging aspects of life is how each day breaks, bringing with it circumstances beyond our control.

This morning, I rose early to start my pre-planned day only to discover that I couldn’t connect to the internet because my Wi-Fi wasn’t working. After repeated calls to the service provider’s customer care contact, and speaking to various departments, the verdict was that my hardware had a technical fault that would require taking it to the nearest service centre for troubleshooting.

From the mundane things on my tidy list of to-dos, to those that feigned seriousness like virtual meetings and deadlines, lines ran across the page crossing out the first three tasks. Life was already whittling down my best-laid plans. Without the internet, the sun’s halo was dimming, and my day was starting out hollowed out.

In this age of remote work, and even remoter social connections, too much of our lives rely on internet connectivity, more than we can appreciate. From early morning social media feeds that tell us what is going on in the world around us, to ERP platforms that tell us what is going on at our workplaces, to the other army of apps that tell us what is going on in every other space our lives inhabit. And because we are so used to being connected, we don’t feel its full import of its absence until days like this.

As frustration drifted closer towards my consciousness, I smiled to myself because I now understand the nature of this world. I understand how our best laid plans often go to shit because life has something else in store for us. I have experienced life too many times to ignore this fact — that there will be days you walk out onto your front porch and find a big white box swaddled in bright red ribbons with your name on it; on other days, it is the Pandora’s box.