...and the Toppling of Tall Trees.
Are you all thawed out now, mostly? I HOPE your power's back on. My lights flickered a bit and I was snowed in like everyone else, but I got lucky. I actually hadn’t realized just how bad the damage was around Portland, until Tuesday or Wednesday.
Once the snow melted down to something I could bike on, I wandered around. Hadn’t expected so many neighborhoods to look like a minor hurricane had hit. So many snapped trunks and downed power lines, so many branches strewn around...
It’s been a weird 12 months.
Trees don’t grow tall forever, right? They’ll come crashing down eventually.
Maybe you anticipate that, figure out what needs to be trimmed and pruned in advance, limit the “destructive potential.”
More likely, you don’t even think to look around and wonder about that sort of thing. Until a storm comes and the stress is too much and you’re left with a huge mess to clean up.
I hope you’re not experiencing too much collateral damage.
Maybe the past year's been a stress test. Maybe it'd be helpful to look at it that way, at least. There's information there, something to learn, things to change? You can do a little bit of emergency preparation without getting fussy about all the possibilities, enough to feel better prepared, anyway.
That's not going to "solve" anything, and it's not going to prevent the next thing from happening, but maybe it's the sugar pill that helps you keep your presence of mind when the next thing happens.
My own sugar pill is the cold showers I've been doing every morning for the past couple of years. Chances are I've jabbered about this to you before. I'd like to say it's turned me into a Badass Berserker Viking, put a fresh new meadow of extra-manly hair on my chest, etc.
But no, I still hate being cold. I hate being mildly chilled. I hate the cold shower itself, but it's my routine now and I get really annoyed with myself if I ever skip it. So I suck it up, set the timer on my iPad for three minutes.
I brush my teeth in the shower to distract myself. My teeth are very thoroughly brushed in the morning.
I've even trained myself to stop shivering for a while. That doesn't make the cold enjoyable, but it takes the tension out, makes it less intensely uncomfortable. It's kind of just a stupid mental game, right? Still, maybe The Next Big Sucky Thing that happens becomes a part of your game, and maybe you're better able to pause and figure out what to do next.
I hope you're able to pause when you get stuck, to figure out small moves forward rather than just spinning your wheels in place.
Be well!