Lately we have been crushed under a multitude of personal/family emergencies/problems . A young man in the family died, the wife had to be with his family a 100 miles away. My oldest daughter & I had to do home chores which mom took care of ( like home schooling the youngest, not-so-smart daughter) in addition to doing things like the laundry while having to prepare for he own exams, and while I travel every night the 100 miles to the other town where mom is to see the extended family and give mom what she needed ( a change of clothes ..etc. )

In these days, I noticed we didn't need much of the emergency kits or cool tools. What we needed was a lot of patience and endurance.

My oldest daughter did a marvellous job of homeschooling an ADHD girl with a memory span of milliseconds. I managed to keep my nerves under control while doing the chores and travelling the long distances to the family and wife, plus delivering every promised job to my boss, even when internet connections were terrible, and I didn't have enough sleeping time.

So, all in all.... Be patient and level headed in rough times
This is more important than all the cool gadgets we seem to stockpile in our GHBs.

This goes double for traveling across country by plane!

Hang in, Chisel.

This is The Perfect Time for Homemade....VODKA!:)

Patience? We need patience?

WE NEED PATIENCE????!!!!

Uh-oh!

Ah, RedFlare, do you sell... oh, never mind...

Sue

Inhale ... exhale. Inhale ... exhale.

Sometimes just breathing is enough.

When it makes sense to look around focus on baby steps. One small step at a time.

AA gets it right when they say you stay sober one day at a time. What gets lost is that sobriety, like any stressful situation, is handled one day/hour/minute at a time.

Years ago I read a book about an air force pilot who went down in a hurricane. He managed to get into his tiny one-man life raft. Then the wave knocked him out of it. Every time he got in the waves would knock him out.

The way he stayed sane and kept going was he would figure that if he dug deep he could take three more. After those three he would dig deep and handle three more. Instead of looking at as a storm with thousands of waves he took them on three at a time. He also stopped counting anything beyond three.

Wash, rinse, repeat.

Handle it one small unit at a time. Then stack those small units into bigger units. In the end you have, on the outside, something less than 120 years. Anybody can handle one second. All you have to do is handle one second 3784320000 times.

Inhale ... exhale.

Out here, that's a sport called surfing, and people spend thousands on their "rafts", their wetsuits, and the parking required to get near the waves.

That would probably get a good laugh from the pilot. even at the time. And he would keep laughing until he got his paycheck and found out it was docked for the time he spent on his 'surfing vacation'.

Better that the military doesn't read about the concept. They may start deducting the time spent in 'sunny, exotic Afghanistan' from the their vacation time.

Ha ha. Right on, Bro.

Reminds me of Reagan calling ketchup a vegetable--literally correct but generally recognized as inappropriate.

Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.
- John Quincy Adams

Thank you all for the kind words.

Goal of this thread is to emphasize the importance of psychological preparedness as much as material preparedness.



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Patience and perseverance have a magical effect before which difficulties disappear and obstacles vanish.
- John Quincy Adams
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Exactly !!

Psychological preparedness sounds good but I have become very skeptical about the ability of anyone to change their psychology. There may be some option for change if you are willing to undergo intensive and protracted counseling, and possibly psychotherapy, but I've never seen anything but very superficial change when it is undertaken alone.

More than once I've seen people, almost always males, who use some combination of mental imagery and manufactured exercises to 'practice' mental toughness and resiliency. It seldom seems to work. I'm thinking about starting a thread exploring the issue.

I would have to agree to some extent with Art_in_FL. But I would say it's a combination of natural physical/mental toughness, and also a form of 'practice'--really just plain being forced to cope with a relentless change for the worse in reality. I have experience with a large number of people inflicted with one of the most horrific diseases known to humankind. For many, it progressively takes away their mobility and every sensory system they have, while causing untold physical and mental pain in the process. To me, it's unbelievable how many of them continue on. Even though I have faced very serious threats to my own personal survival, I often think to myself when working with one of these folks, "Holy MOG, I would've given up long ago."

Most are, by far, just normal folks who unfortunately fell victim to this condition. I would say that most just have the normal human drive to survive, but I would truly say that their unfortunate circumstance often has crystallized and intensified this drive to superhuman levels. To me, these folks are the REAL Superheroes of the Universe.

I have found there is a role for creative impatience.

( I'm thinking about starting a thread exploring the issue.)

Art , I will be "impatiently" waiting for that thread.

One request there, please.
English is not my mother tongue. So, in that psychological/philospophical thread, please go easy on those complex expressions and deep meanings. Assume that there is a 10 years old boy among the audience. OK ?? thanks


Back to the subject.
What I have learnt from this 2-week experience is that: smaller crises are in fact "good" to boost our preparedness immune system. They test our strong points and expose our weak points.

In fact, it was "good" even in social/family terms since it brought me and the wife closer. She saw how much I would scrifice for her and her family and I noticed how close and appreciative she has become towards me. This is something good in case of SHTF where many relations suffer and may break under stress.