It’s just your imagination running away with you, but you often find yourself worried about something that hasn’t occurred yet and may not happen in the future. This is something that might occur when one is confronting an encounter with another person that has the potential to become controversial.
Disagreements or the need to give unpleasant news to someone may often lead to confrontations. If you give it a chance, your mind will go wild and conjure up all kinds of terrifying outcomes for the forthcoming meeting. The truth is almost never as controversial as your wildest imagination has led you to believe it may be.
In other instances, I’ve even had people—customers, in many of those instances—express satisfaction that I had broken the news to them that they had been unsuccessful in their offer on a property. It would seem that they had already begun to have second thoughts about the offer, and it appears that they were privately hoping that it would be unsuccessful.
In the mid-twentieth century, an English cargo ship carrying bottles of Madera from Portugal arrived at its destination port in Scotland. One of the sailors went into the cold cargo hold to check that all the bottles had been shipped. Unaware of this, the other sailor locked the door from outside. The prisoner banged on the bulkheads as hard as he could, but no one heard him, and the ship sailed back to Portugal.
The sailor found ample food in the room, but he knew he would not live long in the low temperatures. He grabbed a piece of metal and used all his energy to scratch out on the bulkheads hour after hour, day after day, an account of his torment of the cross. He described his agony with scientific precision. How the cold chilled his body, freezing his nose, his fingers, and toes. How the burns of the icy air were unbearable.
When the ship anchored in Lisbon, the captain opened the compartment and found the dead sailor. People read his story scrawled on the walls. But that wasn’t the most startling part. The captain measured the temperature of the air inside the compartment. The thermometer read 19 degrees. Since the ship was going back without merchandise, the cooling system was not on. The man only died because he thought he was cold. He was a victim of his imagination.
