Anticipate everything, anticipate nothing

The other night I was watching a Japanese film called "Zatoichi". It was most entertaining and centred around a blind masseur in 19th century Japan who happened to be an expert swordsman (as many blind characters are in these films). He was on a quest to eradicate a criminal gang and there were a number of increasingly unlikely sword fights as he worked his way through the criminal membership. One of his opponents was a highly skilled Ronin (masterless Samurai) who had hired out as a bodyguard to the criminal gang as many samurai had to in order to make a living in this period. At one point these two experts faced off in a sake bar and the masseur closed distance and prevented the samurai from making a conventional draw with his sword by drawing underhand. Whilst no blood was shed at this point this stalemate obviously irked the samurai and he pondered on this long and hard. The masseur also sensed that the samurai was a fearsome opponent and arranged for their climactic duel to take place at night, thus evening the odds somewhat. As the two protagonists faced each other the Ronin envisioned the outcome of the fight if he changed his sword drawing technique. He realised that if he shifted to an underhand grip he would win. With this realisation he let out a slight grunt of satisfaction. Hearing this the Masseur instantly changed his draw to overhand, changing the situation completely and killed the Ronin.
The point of this story is that we can spend a lot of time envisioning specific situations and devoting our energies to solving problems that may never occur. It is much better to go into a fight with an open mind and general strategy than to plan for a specific occurence and be defeated. Train yourself to parry attacks and then riposte; not to parry an attack that is just three inches above your right elbow with a riposte to the opponents third rib. This situation may never occur in a fight so will remain essentially useless.
This is a philosophy for life in general; it is much better to have minimal expectations and a general strategy rather than specific hopes of one unique outcome which are ultimately unfulfilled.