In Java there's this concept called exception handling. It's a sort of preparation one makes in code to deal with potential problems. You mark a particular method that it's got the potential to "throw" an exception, and then you "try" to do the thing that might cause the problem, and "catch" the error that gets thrown, and deal with it somehow.
Life has this too.
Yesterday, after grappling with a code problem for a few days, I asked for help from a co-worker. They helped me out, and together we worked through the problems I'd been having. After they'd left my desk, I implemented the solution, finding a few more slight problems along the way, and handily dealing with them.
It's a funny thing, when you write code for a living you tend to live in this weird binary way where you either feel like you're totally on top of things and kind of godlike, or you have no clue what the hell you are doing.
So I got the particular feature I was building all tested, and checked it in, and was feeling really pretty good about myself. I went to lunch.
When I came back, I went looking for something new to do, and couldn't find a single thing that looked like something I had the skills or drive to do. I sort of floundered for an hour or three. I had that nagging feeling of being overwhelmed by the unknown. When your job relies on you confidently using your skills, that's pretty paralyzing.
Then I realized I could use the downtime to self-teach myself a bunch of things, and dug into that. I made the best effort I could at the time to acquire some new skills.
At the end of the day, I was still feeling sort of "spoonless", but took myself out for a nice dinner.(Because Missy was still driving home from a long day trip.) By the time I got home, she was home, too.
As we went to bed, I realized that my I-don't-know-what-to-do-next feeling earlier that day was a form of exception, and that I'd properly handled it. I went to bed feeling like my day had worked out for the best after all.
My gratitude for the day then is that we have that sort of exception handling I'm talking about built into us, organically. Sure, things come up which knock us for a loop, but eventually, we're self-correcting. That's a good thing.