What Do You Call It When…

There’s an experience that I have a lot and I don’t know if there’s a name for it or if other people do this too so I’m curious to hear your take on it.

Things don’t surprise me.

It’s like when I get new information about something, it just gets instantly processed into what I know about that something and so I think Yes, that makes sense.

Someone says, “Did you know that ______?” and I didn’t but five minutes later I could swear that I’d always known that!

This has proved to be a good survival skill. It happened like this when I visited India. People told me that it would be so different and I’d get intense culture shock and be surprised by things. But things don’t surprise me. Each new thing that I saw was instantly processed into what I knew about India and it all made sense so quickly that I never felt a single moment of culture shock.

As useful as this skill can be, I’m a little sad that I never experience the wonder and delight of surprise.

When this happens I often think of my high school English teacher who used to say that a miracle is only a miracle until it happens. Then it just is. He would say, “If your dead grandfather walked into the kitchen you wouldn’t say it’s a miracle, you’d say oh, there’s grandpa.”

I think that’s very true. At least for me. No matter how weird the thing is that happens, I’m left saying “Of course that’s what happened. How could it be any other way?”