Business of LifeAt some point in your life you realize that not everything turns out well and in fact your world can change in a moment. If your country is at war and you're in a war zone, you know this without a doubt.
The smarter or more experienced of us realize that you can't waste time worrying about "something happening" but that it's better to be prepared "just in case".
I wrote once about being prepared.
"Be prepared for what?" someone once asked Robert Baden-Powell, the Founder of the Boy Scouts.
"Why, for any old thing," he replied.
Baden Powell's idea was to prepare boys to handle emergencies and to prepare them for life. He wanted his Scouts to be prepared body and mind for any struggle, and to meet with a strong heart whatever challenges might lie ahead.
He understood that knowing you had done your best enabled you to live more happily and without regret.
Gerald Vanderlein the wonderful writer who blogs at American Digest lives in Laguna, California and live-blogged the slide of many of his neighbors' houses down, down the hillside in There Goes the Neighborhood.
Yesterday, he felt an earthquake. He calls it BUMP! He realizes he was "an unreconstructed fool" like most of us.
My neighbor shrugged. "What you gonna do?" he said in the manner of those who, faced with their continuing powerlessness, have nothing at all to say.
"I don't know about you," I answered, "but I'm getting dressed."
"There's a thought."
I went back inside and got dressed thinking, "Now what does one wear to a truly stunning natural disaster?" This thought revealed to me that I had not a smidgen of an idea about what to wear or what to do at all. Not a single brain cell in my over-furnished brain had been tasked with determining how to survive the most likely disaster in my little world.
Like millions of others on this shaky slab of the planet, I just woke up every day, took a breath, had some coffee and ran my "I'm okay and I'm okay" tape in the background and got on with "havin' a good one." Like millions of others in this state which is, like all states, just a state of mind, I "had the experience but missed the meaning." Like millions of others, I had -- in my heart -- scoffed at the old man in the Lexus who had, probably for the hundredth time, pushed to wife and the cat into the car and driven to the valley with his various survival supplies rattling in the trunk. Unlike millions of others, I stood in my bedroom and, not for the first time, realized that I was an unreconstructed fool. Worse still, I was a fool that laughed at the wise. Worse yet, I had no plan for a disaster that was not an if, but a when; a bad day that only lacked a date certain.
Today he got a plan. And a Go-Bag.
Experienced sailors, having seen the lethal caprice of the sea and survived it, have a habit of packing a "Go-Bag." People who advise about emergencies also advise you to have one. These bags are supposed to contain all sorts of items handy in a survival situation: radios, batteries, flashlights, first-aid kits, ropes, knives, and so on. All the items deemed necessary to get by and keep going if the world around you is, suddenly, transformed to one state or another of, well, rubble.
He's smart enough to know you add the most precious things you can carry.
• A collection of photographs of my daughter in a small album. It stops at age 11.
• A card she once made for me for a long-ago father's day.
• Pictures of my wife and stepson.
• A long letter of advice from my father that he wrote to me when I was too young to know how valuable it was.
• A photograph of myself and my two brothers in our Sunday School best posing with my mom and dad on some long ago summer afternoon.
• A sheet of paper with a hand-written haiku made for me by my first love.
• A slim King James Bible owned and bearing the initials of my paternal Grandfather, that old reprobate.
• A page from a notebook containing idle doodles and a few self-portraits of my daughter that she did, off hand, while being bored at my apartment in New York five years back.
• Tom Mandel's Marine dog-tags.
• A small oval tin given to me by my wife Sheryl containing a very small picture of her and two silver hearts that make a soft rattling sound when you shake it.
What are your very favorite things you would be desolate without?
Think about your own GO BAG. At minimum, take digital photos and store them on a memory stick in your Go-Bag.
You can either assemble the essentials in a Go-Bag yourself or buy anyone of a variety of pre-packed "ready kits" at the Red Cross or others that I've listed at If you're not prepared, Ready Kits are for you
Laughing Wolf has a lot of thoughts like my own only he factors in bureaucrats in Some Additional Thoughts on Practical Preparedness
His earlier posts on preparedness when firestorms and blackouts in California were everyday matters. No unreconstructed fool, he.
Rational Preparedness -Part Two
Rational Preparedness - Part Three
Practical Preparedness: Bugging Out
Posted by Jill Fallon at June 14, 2005 06:58 AM | PermalinkThanks for the links and for an excellent post!
Posted by: Laughing Wolf at June 14, 2005 05:45 AMSteve Jobs:
"My third story is about death. When I was 17 I read a quote that went something like "If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you'll most certainly be right." It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself, "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "no" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something. Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important thing I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life, because almost everything--all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure--these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.
About a year ago, I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn't even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctors' code for "prepare to die." It means to try and tell your kids everything you thought you'd have the next ten years to tell them, in just a few months. It means to make sure that everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.
I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope, the doctor started crying, because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and, thankfully, I am fine now.
This was the closest I've been to facing death, and I hope it's the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept. No one wants to die, even people who want to go to Heaven don't want to die to get there, and yet, death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because death is very likely the single best invention of life. It's life's change agent; it clears out the old to make way for the new. right now, the new is you. But someday, not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it's quite true. Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary."
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=152625&cid=12810404
Posted by: Dimitar Vesselinov at June 14, 2005 08:19 PMWhat a terrific pointer, Dimitar. If you hadn't quoted it, I wouldn't have read it and if I hadn't read it, I would have missed one of the best commencement speeches I've ever read.
Posted by: Jill at June 15, 2005 01:00 AM