Planning for Crises – A Key Life Competency

Disastrous times can sometimes be anticipated.

It is interesting what happened suddenly in the demise of ancient Egypt. Also, with the dinosaurs, sudden extinction became them. Crises throughout history have drastically altered life as it was known. At times crises sweep over us too, and without the faintest of warnings.

Getting ready for such crises—and living ready—is, therefore, a great skill of and for preparation.

This is not living in fear; it’s simply preparing ourselves for the worst so we can truly enjoy the best that life has to offer.

Foreseeing the Possibilities

It is such a wisdom activity to bravely consider ‘what might be’ or ‘become’.

Again, this is not so much morbidity, but realism, to know that whilst life is generally pretty static there are no guarantees that things will always remain as they are or as we would like them.

When we think one year ahead we might consider the growth changes in those around us, our children and grandchildren for instance. Going out further to the five-year-from-now mark and we see how things really are very different to how they are now. Twenty years from now our lives will have changed more, perhaps, than we’d believe in our pondering about them now.

And, yet, any time in between all this we can have something occur that we totally didn’t expect. Mostly these will be minor things; minor crises. At times, though, we’ll be swept away on a current of disbelief and anguish.

The Advantages of this Activity

If there weren’t some advantages in this sort of activity people wouldn’t be motivated to engage in it.

Simply the biggest advantage is we save ourselves some unnecessary heartache as we have the real opportunity at training ourselves in our future grief—to even a small extent—now.

This approach is ‘borrowing’ into the grief of tomorrow whilst the days are good today. It’s seen as a preparation, knowing that grief—as a living process—is something for which we all go through... indeed, we grieve even mini amounts every single day.

A New Approach

The way of life that thinks about the crisis as a daily possibility is one that is getting beyond the fear of it all—even beyond fear itself in some quarters—as we steel ourselves in the potential of reality.

This way we begin to see life as it actually is—a thing that’s never to be taken for granted.

© 2010 S. J. Wickham.