Many of you who have for years followed my BuDhaBlog know that every year I bring up the Black Swan blog. I fell in love with the Black Swan theory by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, a Lebanese-American essayist, scholar, statistician, and former options trader and risk analyst, whose work concerns problems of randomness, probability, and uncertainty. His 2007 book The Black Swan has been described by The Sunday Times as one of the twelve most influential books since World War II.

Let me explain why I fell in love with this theory...

My husband is also a statistician, a data-driven pragmatist, a man who says: "don't give me anecdotes give me facts." Let me tell you, in our household winning an argument with pure facts is a challenge, but one that I have mastered like the most accomplished samurai. My mastery is heavily based on the Black Swan theory.

So, you ask...what in the name of creation is the Black Swan theory? It is the improbable. It is an improbable event or circumstance that data simply cannot predict. Now you probably know where I am going with this...

Black Swan events are many times catastrophic and life-altering, they take away our comfort zone.

In my "samurai" opinion...The only thing that can combat an improbable event is our perception of the event, our actions triggered by the event, and our resiliency due to the event. Black Swan moments teach us to live in the present because nothing we could have done in the past could prevent these events, and much nothing we can do towards the future can avoid a Black Swan appearing again. Because remember...they are unpredictable.

So, my beautiful BuDhaGirls, be samurais. Defeat the improbable by living in the present.

It is my deepest hope and wish that we will look back on these days and say we survived, we learned, we grew, and that we will all be back doing what we love in our beautiful world...very soon.