A friend says to me periodically that she really feels dumb, and says it seems as if other people know what they’re doing. She especially uses this when talking about technology, the Internet, and money, but she pretty much applies it across the board.

“Nobody knows what they’re doing,” I tell her. “You’re not alone.”

She looks doubtful, and then signs up for another iPhone class, or makes an appointment with a financial advisor at her work. She’s afraid to pay her bills online, because she is sure someone is going to scam her, or she’s making an incorrect decision.

I don’t know if I’m the right person for her confidences. I make a lot of wrong decisions. I have always made many. The difference is, over a lifetime, I’ve made a virtue of how I react to them.

I have a couple mental images of how to do it, and one is “dropping the cup.” If I drop a cup in the kitchen, it’s going to fall, and it’s going to break. I could desperately try to catch it before it hits, but 9 times out of 10 that would pull a muscle. Instead, I should just watch it fall, and step very carefully when I go to get the dustpan and brush, so I don’t get shards in my feet.

It could be as simple as (this morning) writing “today” instead of “yesterday” in my handwritten journal, looking at it, sighing, crossing it out, and writing the correct word above, very neatly.

It could be what I did last Wednesday, which is briskly a Manhattan subway in entirely the wrong direction. When I realized what had happened, I sighed, got up, got out at the next stop, and changed my plans, exploring a different area instead.

Then there’s what’s going on in the corner house next door. I heard planks being dropped, and went out to investigate. There was a truck parked at curb, full of pressure-treated lumber, and guys were dumping pressure-treated lumber out of the yard and over the fence. They were dismantling the deck in the yard. It was only put in a few years ago. I asked the guy if they were replacing it, and he said patiently, “I don’t know what they’re doing,” and kept working.

“That house is a story,” I said, and went back inside.

The place was a rental when we moved next door twenty years ago, that house. It had been stuccoed over, a thing you do when you don’t feel like pointing old red brick, and four young people lived there. They were pretty messed up on drugs. They moved out, and a woman moved in with her son. She was, I’m pretty sure, a drunk, but eventually she moved out because the landlord wouldn’t fix the roof leak.

Then a cheerful crew of non-English-speaking guys showed up and renovated it, top to bottom, and the owner put it on the market. A realtor invited me in to look during an open house. “You’re not gonna believe this,” she said sardonically, and I didn’t, because everything was crooked and off-kilter. No one had used a level in the whole undertaking. It was also ugly, with that manufactured flooring that looks like it has fossilized. But now the back yard looked nice–new fencing, and a pressure-treated raised floor. (Rats lived underneath the deck and ate the bird seed I put out, but you can’t have everything.)

Thehouse sat. It didn’t sell. It was an AirBNB for a couple of years, and there was one party there that was a doozy, with the cops coming three times. From time to time neighborhood people moved in briefly. The owner advertised it for rent. There were some well-dressed ladies there last weekend, overnight, because you can’t tell from the listing that “Art Museum Area” doesn’t always mean “fancy.”

And now someone’s ripping out the deck.

You tell me, does anyone know what they’re doing in this situation?

I sure as hell don’t know, but I don’t sit in my house worrying. I go outside in my bare feet, and talk to strangers about it, and then I make it into a story.

That’s the other thing I do when I screw up, and that’s “make it into a story.” I have some awesome failure stories, some of them about my own failures and some of them about the disasters of other people, and I find it comforting that no one ever actually seems to know what they’re doing. Except those people who live to explain things, and they’re usually full of soup.

At any rate, I have lots of stories to tell my nervous friend whenever she suspects other people have a clue.