How We Prepare
Be Prepared
In my last piece, I wrote about how we repair. Our bodies, our relationships, our social environments all benefit from developing what I call “repair radar.” Repair often follows from something yielding or breaking, something going wrong with the situations that we are in.
Yet there is a kind of uncertainty that is built into our everyday lives that begs us to not wait until something feels wrong or off. We must prepare for things to yield, break, or go south, at least the smaller things that are in some ways predictable to go wrong.
It’s like the fire department says: we must have contingency plans and escape routes marked clearly. Or as my Girl Scout den mamas used to tell us: Be prepared. In preparing, we envision different possible outcomes and the solutions that feel right for us thereby expanding our expectations and our ability to prevent harm.
Uncertain vs. Unexpected
I attended a lecture recently in which the speaker was talking about the uncertainty that is built into every aspect of our lives due to the pandemic. Where we will work today and how we will work today, whether our kids will be allowed to go to school today and how we can get them okayed to return to their classroom today, what kind of transportation we’ll be taking today and whether the routes will be clear today, and on and on. All these things are perma-uncertain and we have to now shapeshift to meet this new normal.
As a result, we are forced to rework our prior notion of uncertainty to be normal, or at least normalize our past contingency plans to make them our daily normal. We are also forced to separate this from what is truly unexpected—like a new variant of virus hitting our community or a major climate catastrophe upending the built environment we live in.
When I am feeling overwhelmed by these changes, I take solace in our intrinsic adaptability. Each one of our cells contains the instructions manual to interpret the environmental inputs we face and to find a way forward. I’m not talking about our genomes but rather our epigenomes, which take in information from our environments and then adapt to our present circumstances. This intelligence-gathering cellular mechanism is the framework for all life on Earth.
Still, for us to truly use this principle to our advantage in social terms, we must use our energy and wisdom to improve our social environments so that we are making the best set of possibilities for all. Raise up our collective baseline, and we make that new normal a lot less devastating and a lot more nurturing for each and every one of us.