When the Universe Calls Your Bluff: A Story of Water, Flu, and Building Anyway

When the universe decides to fact-check your writing with a water crisis and flu

Let's be honest about something: the universe can have a wicked sense of humor.

I should have known better when I published "Building Anyway" and mused about foundations being what we practice when nothing feels certain. The cosmic forces that be must have read that post, glanced at each other with raised eyebrows, and said, "Oh really? Let's test that theory, shall we?"

And test me they did.

The ink had barely metaphorically dried on my declarations of resilience when life decided to throw not one but two spectacular curve balls my way. Because apparently moving wasn't chaotic enough on its own.

There's a peculiar law of the human experience that philosophers haven't properly named yet: the moment you claim mastery over chaos, chaos gets personal. It shows up on your doorstep with a clipboard and a wry smile, ready to administer the exam you didn't study for. 👹

We think wisdom is something we achieve and then possess. But what if wisdom is more like a subscription service? You don't own it; you just get temporary access until your next payment of humility comes due.

The Day My Water Was Shut Off

There are certain things in life you take for granted until they're suddenly gone. Breathing. Wi-Fi. Running water.

I discovered something peculiar about my new city: tenants aren't allowed to put utilities in their own names. It's all handled through the property owner—a system that works beautifully for them. 🙄

I’m a few weeks into my “building anyway” when I turned the faucet and heard the sad, hollow gasp of pipes carrying nothing but air and broken promises.

No water.

Not a drop.

After a frantic call to the utility company, I learned that something had slipped through the cracks. The previous tenants hadn't paid the water bill for February or March. My landlord hadn't caught it. And here I stood, dishwasher half-loaded, coffee mug empty, suddenly powerless to fix my own problem.

I couldn't even pay the water company myself. I had no authority. No standing. No ability to say, "Here, take my money, just make the water flow again."

The control freak in me nearly short-circuited. There's something particularly maddening about a problem you can see clearly but can't fix yourself.

So I did what any reasonable person would do. I went to the grocery store, bought gallons of water and far too many snacks (stress shopping eating is my love language coping mechanism), and came home to figure out what living in pioneer times might feel like.

Back at home, I filled my Keurig with store-bought water to make coffee, put another gallon next to the bathroom sink, and decided to just... build anyway.

I couldn't make the water company move any faster. I couldn't magically grant myself the authority to pay someone else's bill. But I could play with my dogs in the backyard. I could arrange my office the way I wanted it. I could light a candle that smelled like home.

Six hours later, my phone buzzed with a text:

"Hey, so sorry for the trouble. We got the bill paid and also covered April's bill too. We fixed the problem for you going forward."

And in an hour, water flowed again. My temporary pioneer life ended before it really began.

But something remained—that feeling of continuing to build a life while systems failed around me. There's a particular kind of peace that comes with focusing on what you can control while the rest burns.

It's not resignation. It's selective attention.

Have you noticed how often we confuse control with care? As if the only way to show we value something is by managing every aspect of it?

Maybe true attentiveness isn't about controlling outcomes but about choosing where to place our limited energy when outcomes refuse to be controlled.

My water situation resolved itself without my direct intervention. This should bother the part of me that believes my involvement is essential to solving problems. Instead, it revealed something I've been slow to accept: sometimes the most productive thing I can do is to get out of the way of solutions that don't require my management.

A Flu in May

The cough started innocently enough.

A scratch in my throat. A feeling of "off-ness" I couldn't quite place. By nightfall, my body had made its intentions crystal clear: we're going down, captain, and we're going down hard.

Who gets the flu in May? Apparently, me.

For context: respiratory illnesses and I have a complicated history. The swine flu once landed me on a ventilator. My lungs hold grudges and have excellent memory for trauma. So when the thermometer read 103°F and my chest felt like I'd swallowed broken glass, a familiar fear crept in.

I barricaded myself in the basement, a nest of blankets and tissues forming around me like the world's most pathetic bird building the world's most disgusting nest. The irony wasn't lost on me that I'd chosen to watch apocalyptic shows while my body waged its own little end times.

If I was going to feel like I was dying, apparently, everyone else in my fictional viewing world needed to join me.

Between fever dreams and hacking coughs, something unexpected happened. From my basement window, I began to notice the rhythm of my new neighborhood in ways my healthy, busy self had missed.

The mail carrier who pauses to greet the many neighborhood dogs and cats.

The school kids who walk home at 3:15, their voices carrying through my partially open window.

The precise time the garbage truck rumbles down the street (now I know exactly how long I can procrastinate dragging my bin to the curb).

My fevered brain catalogued these details, creating a mental map of my new world that I'd been too distracted to notice before. There's something strangely intimate about being sick in a new place—you become acquainted with its quietest hours, its background noises, the way light moves across unfamiliar walls.

There's a paradox in illness that no wellness guru will tell you about: sometimes breaking down is the only way to truly settle in.

Our productivity-obsessed culture treats sickness as an inconvenient interruption of "real life." But what if illness isn't just a pause in living but a different form of it? A slower, more receptive mode where we notice what our healthy efficiency typically bulldozes past?

I've spent years trying to optimize every waking hour, squeezing productivity from moments like they're nearly-empty toothpaste tubes. But lying there, feverish and forced into stillness, I witnessed parts of my new home I would have otherwise missed entirely.

The sickness that I feared would disconnect me from my surroundings actually rooted me more deeply within them. There's a certain surrender that happens when your body decides it's taking the wheel, and in that surrender, a different kind of presence becomes possible.

Yes, I was miserable. But I wasn't as sick as I would have been years ago. Maybe all that trauma work I've done has actually healed something in my lungs? Maybe we really do build resilience in ways we can't see until we need it?

Or perhaps the most radical thought: what if my illness wasn't a failure of wellness but exactly the forced slowdown I needed to truly arrive in this new home?

Building Through Chaos, Again

The water incident lasted a day. The flu, a week. Neither was the end of the world, though both felt momentarily apocalyptic in their own special ways.

What strikes me now is how perfectly they illustrated what I'd written about earlier:that foundations aren't what happen after everything settles. They're what we practice precisely when nothing feels certain.

I didn't wait until I had running water to arrange my bookshelves.

I didn't wait until my fever broke to learn the rhythm of my neighborhood.

We're so conditioned to believe that proper life requires proper conditions. That we should pause the building until the ground stops shaking.

What beautiful, terrible nonsense. (my new tagline? hehe)

Life isn't a series of perfect, stable platforms from which we launch our next moves. It's more like trying to build a raft while already drifting downriver. The building and the floating sometimes happen simultaneously.

There's something poetic about how the universe tests our convictions. It's as if it holds up our most cherished beliefs to the light, examining them for authenticity. "You say you believe in building anyway? Let's find out."

I wonder if that's what growth actually is—not the steady accumulation of wisdom, but the recurring cycle of declaring what we believe, having it thoroughly tested, and emerging on the other side with a humbler, truer version of that same belief.

We think transformation is about becoming something new. But what if it's actually about becoming more authentically what we already are?

The storms come. The water gets shut off. The flu arrives in May when everyone else is posting about beach trips and gardening successes.

And still, we build.

Not because we're particularly brave or special, but because the alternative—waiting for perfect conditions—means missing our own lives.

Here's the truth that chaos has taught me: readiness isn't a state you achieve through preparation. It's a decision you make in the moment circumstances demand it.

Consider how often we postpone our lives waiting for the mythical "right time." We organize our planning apps, vision boards, and five-year strategies as if life respects our Google Calendar invitations. Meanwhile, life is already happening—messy, immediate, and indifferent to our preference for neatness.

So here I am, in my new home that's finally beginning to know the sound of my voice, the weight of my footsteps. The cabinet doors no longer feel like strangers. My coffee maker hums from a corner that now feels exactly right.

I'm not fully settled. There are still a few boxes lingering. There are still a couple blank walls.

But I'm building anyway—through water shutoffs and fevers, through uncertainty and flux.

And I'd bet anything that you are too, in your own way, in your own life. Building through divorces and diagnoses. Through job changes and losses. Through all the moments when the universe looks at your carefully laid plans and says, "That's cute. Now watch this."

What are you building right now, my friend, right in the beautiful chaos of your unfinished life?

Whatever it is, don't wait. The ground never stops moving. The water sometimes stops flowing. The body occasionally betrays.

Build anyway.

The stuff we create in chaos has a particular magic to it—a resilience that comes not from perfect conditions but from the stubborn insistence that this moment, however flawed, still counts toward the life we're creating.

The universe might call our bluff. It might test every principle we claim to live by. But in doing so, it gives us the chance to transform theoretical wisdom into embodied truth.

And there's no more powerful foundation than that.

Is there someone who might need to read this today? Would you mind sharing it with them?

About Alex

I’m Alex Lovell — political psychologist, yoga therapist, and writer.

Lived homeless. Been divorced. Survived a seven-car pileup with a semi. Fell in love with questions that don’t have easy answers. I’ve met a lot of thresholds. Even the one before death.

These days, I split my time between research, writing, and holding space for people figuring out who they are after everything shifted.

This Substack is where I make sense of things out loud.
I write for people in transition — between roles, beliefs, relationships, selves.
The ones quietly wondering, “What now?” but allergic to one-size-fits-all answers.

Sometimes I quote research. Sometimes I quote my own nervous system.
One speaks in data, the other in sensation. I’ve stopped choosing sides.