Avoid Crisis Management Now
Remind yourself that most situations work themselves out without you
Reports of record snow fall in northern California felt terrorizing a few weeks ago. Now that weather has warmed up, devastating flooding is following. Nature does not care about the media frenzy.
Neither should you.
Catastrophic events in the world do not need your permission.
While, I am not apathetic, I have seen that overthinking and planning is ineffective in my personal life. Control is elusive.
Surely, no one can control Mother Nature. But my own destiny is in my hands, right?
It is the fairy tale we tell ourselves. If you work hard, good things will happen. Maybe yes. But unfortunately, maybe no.
Case in point: I wanted a life where writing and animals take center stage and I was not seeking outside validation to make me feel worthy.
I went through hoops to try to make that happen.
Reality is that it took loss to define me. There was no magic wand I waved.
It was the loss of my urban dwelling that led to a quieter life and the dissolution of relationships that removed the validators.
So much of my time in earlier years, was careening from crisis to crisis to put out real and perceived fires. Truth is they would have probably smoldered for awhile before eventually dying out on their own.
Granted it felt exciting to hold the hose, as the flames were more inviting than scary. I think I was role playing my American cultural underpinnings, conquering and manipulating for the “greater good.”
I am apparently not alone, given the hypnotic dance that the American public is now having with HBO series Succession.
The appeal of the show, now in its final season, is the chess game of Logan Roy’s children, vying to take control. One sibling is in favor, and then the scenes shift and another is seemingly closer to getting the brass ring.
It is the great, some would say horrifying, tradition of the titans that built this country. It is an in-bred competitiveness and a belief that winning is achievable if I am smarter — and in the show’s case — more ruthless.
But the show also proves control is elusive. Logan Roy dies. There is no named successor.
It is loss that defines the siblings’ future.
My takeaway to all this: we are just bit players and the stage of life is not easily directable.
But…there is a small part of me that wants Logan to return from the grave with one final: “F… off” showing that maybe, just maybe, control can prevail from beyond the grave.
