Circuit Breakers...

I had a meeting this morning, and in the course of an uninteresting discussion on modifications being made/needing to be made to an aircraft we currently have in our hangar, one of my coworkers mentioned a complicated wiring situation which had resulted in "a circuit breaker to nowhere". While the discussion itself will not mean much to anyone I know, I was drawn in by the idea of circuit breakers which have no functional purpose. Normally, when the system is strained, the breaker blows, saving the system from a potentially catastrophic overload, but the interesting idea, here, to me, was the idea of life's circuit breakers. Do they exist? Is there any way for us to avoid a systematic blowout in life, when our brain, heart, body is stressed past its safe limit?

I think we all believe we have safe guards in place, but many of them really are just circuit breakers to nowhere. They are there, but there is no connection, realistically, between them and the stresses that cause our lives to short circuit. Think about it: When was the last time you honestly recognised when you were in danger of a blowout before it happened? I can't EVER remember catching one before it blew. Never. Maybe life's fried wiring is unavoidable. Maybe its part of some greater process, which leads us to rebuild in a different direction, to re-evaluate our goals, to find new paths to follow. Personally, I don't believe in fate, in the sense that our lives are already laid out before us, and we are just mindlessly wandering to some predetermined endpoint, but I do believe that if we listen to the world around us, we will be able to discern the right conduit for us to travel in, at the particular moment in time that we are making a given decision.

If we release our white-knuckled grip on life, stop trying to control everything so much, will we end up with a great, unencumbered life, full of twists and turns, or will we end up sitting in the middle of a sea of burned up wires, bewildered and and unable to function? Is there even a way to connect our life's disconnected circuits to some kind of breaker that will stop disaster just before it hits?

Here's my opinion: Disasters make us who we are. They are the defining moments in our lives. If we don't know how we will handle a crisis, where do we find our strength? I think our circuit breakers to nowhere allow us to take leaps of faith, because they save us from the blinding fear of knowing that life could blow on us at any moment. We truly, honestly believe that these stopgaps in life will keep us from falling, and so we lean freely, without fear that we will fall. And when we do fall, we find out just what we are made of. So maybe, in life, circuit breakers to nowhere are much more important than the functioning ones would be anyway. Maybe not having safety measure in life is what gives us life.