Reasonable Adversity

Of the few things that are under my control, my reactions are supposedly one of them.  I say “supposedly” because it turns out to be excruciatingly difficult to control said reactions.  There’s a reaction reflex- and 47 years or so of reenforcing that reflex reaction-to overcome.  It’s just not an easy thing and I don’t always (or often) succeed.  So this year I’ve tried to implement a new reflex reaction question.  I try to reflexively ask myself “is it a crisis or an annoyance?”.  It gives me just a second longer to think about what is happening, to consider it, to classify it, so to speak.  If it’s simply an annoyance, I should just let it go.  It’s not important, I don’t need to “worry my pretty little head about it”.  If it’s a crisis, then I should make a plan to deal with it. 

If I manage to give myself that extra moment, it works pretty well.  Turns out, there just aren’t that many crises in my life!  This is a surprising thing to discover in my 40s.  If you would have asked me in my 20s, I surely would have felt otherwise.  I was a feisty little ball of reflex reaction bouncing back and forth between crises.  Yet another reason to not envy the young! 

I got to practice this in the extreme Sunday while standing in the middle of the literal flood.  Literal floods can sure feel like a crisis, and my reflex reaction-had I let it consume me-would have been to start looking for jobs and canceling the rest of the season to be sure.  But this is the third time in 16 years that we’ve had severe flooding, and I think I finally know better. 
So we poked around a bit, counting on the fact that historically (the other two floods) the flood waters recede quickly and that it’s going to look worse in the moment of the flood than the actual damage. 

There would be damage and loss, to be sure, but there was no need to panic (is there ever an actual need to panic??), that we would need to make a recovery plan in the morning, but that there was nothing we could do in the immediate moment.  A bit more than an annoyance I can just let go, but not quite all the way on the spectrum to be classified as a full-blown crisis.  Somewhere in the middle.  A reasonable adversity.

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