Survival in Tough Times
So Here We Are...
So we wake up in the morning, sit up, swing a leg over the side and begin the day. We have some breakfast and the morning cup of tea. Okay, okay. Some of you still drink coffee. The first thing we do is look at the daily situation report followed by the daily question.
So here we are. What do we do next?
Doesn't this apply to every day of our lives, or even to every hour of every day?
We must constantly address our situation and decide what we will do next.
It's time to make a list
Sometimes the question is urgent. "Bulletin: A meteor the size of Manhattan is headed directly for Podunk, Iowa and is expected to impact in or near that area in approximately 52 minutes." What's the first thing you do? If you don't live in Iowa, find the atlas! If you do live in Iowa, find the car keys! On the way to the garage, decide which car is faster. Without going back to the house, get in the car and make tracks away from Podunk in a hurry.
With luck, the question is usually not that urgent, but there are several questions that confront us. What do we do about this or that or that other situation? It's time to make a list. The list gets made in random order, as it comes out of our heads. Then it helps to assign priority. Number them from one to five. If you want to get really fancy, cut and paste them into the right order, then print the list with spaces between. Put the list someplace where it can't be ignored. Now you've got a system going.
So here we are. Here are the choices in priority order. What do we do next? It's easy. Go for number one priority. If number one is impossible right now, number two is ready.
There are many applications for these questions and choices. There is our daily existence. There are political and business considerations. What about retirement or that rainy day fund? Long term or short term decisions ahead?
To make decisions, we need information and perspective. What is normal? What is abnormal? Will our choices take us away from the routine? Should the routine be changed? Is the routine part of the problem? Is the absence of a routine part of the problem.
Make a list and prioritize it. Keep it handy and adjust the priorities as necessary
Have we gone off course? Are we headed in the right direction? If not, how do we determine what the right direction is? Do we steer to the old course or choose a new one? What is different now? What do we do next? If there's nothing to do about it today, what can I do today to move toward a solution in the near future?
Make a list and prioritize it. Keep it handy and adjust the priorities as necessary. If it's a written list, there's no need to keep it memorized and there's no need to remember the priority order. Instead of spending the time to keep the list in your head, the time can be spent on addressing the top priority items. To reorient, check the list!
It's important to accept that there are some situations where we exert no control and no power to change things. That's okay. Bring it back to your own life. How about I just clean out my closet? If I can't keep the yard from looking like a tip, how can I expect to change others, or change the world? Finish a job and mark it off the list. Where I come from, that's real progress.
If we know what to do, or if we know how to decide what to do, then we won't expect someone else to decide for us. When someone tells us they know what we should do, we can listen and consider, but in a free country we must always decide for ourselves.
It would be ultimately fatal to turn our decision-making over to others
It would be ultimately fatal to turn our decision-making over to others. We live in freedom for a reason. That reason is because people are happiest and most productive when they are free. When someone comes along who tells us he knows better than we do what we need to do, that person should be viewed with much skepticism.
So it's up to us. No one can really rescue us, and we wait forever for something that's never going to happen. Dependency as an excuse for never doing anything.
Know what's going on around you. Be aware of your surroundings. You can't be prepared for every possible contingency, and if you try to be, you'll drive yourself nuts or at the very least be very anxious all the time. You'll also drive everyone around you nuts. If you don't know what to do, perhaps you know what NOT to do. There's a start.
So here we are. What is the next right thing to do?
Dr. Bruce Smith -- Bio and
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Dr. Smith (Inkwell, Hearth and Plow) is a retired professor of history and a lifelong observer of politics and world events. He holds degrees from Indiana University and the University of Notre Dame. In addition to writing, he works as a caretaker and transforms properties into retirement havens and retreats. His non-fiction book The War Comes to Plum Street, about daily life in the 1930s and during World War II, may be ordered from Indiana University Press.
