A Deeper Kind of Preparedness

"He's go...ing through cha-anges..."

My kids started watching "Big Mouth" which uses a song in which this line stuck out to me. It's been a few months at least since I last saw them watching it, but that song plays in my head a lot. It's an indicator that I'm feeling uncomfortable and awkward in dealing with things.

Yesterday I felt really full for an hour or so, and then the feeling turned into a sore stomach. That made it hard to sleep last night. I was hoping that I'd be better by this morning because I was planning to attend Toastmasters Leadership Institute. I'm home recovering instead.

It seems that I didn't digest much yesterday, so I'm pretty weak today. I've skipped my walk and extra exercise. This usually throws me off a lot more than I care to be thrown off, but I'm handling it better. I'm conserving energy by skipping exercise, but, and this is a bit new, I'm sticking to my routine otherwise.

To be prepared for things that are foreseen, you plan ahead, imagine what various things the future could hold ("foreseen," right?) and gather to yourself whatever resources will help you handle them.  How do you prepare for the unforeseen?  Such preparation is what I mean by a "deeper kind of preparedness."

It does involve some knowledge (working assumptions, I like to remember to call them), but it's mostly building a history of being spry - spry of mind and spry of body.  Having a "mind like water" seems like a good idea.  For me, this means being able to see clearly even when what you see is troubling, threatening, scary, or otherwise encourages us to look through filters.  It helps to remember that the truth, whatever it is, will ultimately be the best information to use as a guide.

Contrast this with "cognitive dissonance" which preserves a person's world-view in the face of evidence that suggests that world-view is wrong.  For me, the dissonance comes from our natural assumptions that A) our perception is accurate, and B) our interpretation is mostly correct.  One of those things has to be wrong if the evidence suggests our world-view is wrong.  It's okay.  "The Truth is Out There."  Consider yourself to be on a cooperative journey toward truth.  It's a journey in which you will keep honing your world-view.  That will be alarming to people who know you, but if you inspire them to join in the cooperative search for truth, their alarms will fade out.

The way I better handle my day being thrown off track by skipping exercise (or any other change to my normal routine) is to find something which acts as an adequate replacement given the conditions that broke my routine.  My "exercise" this morning was healing my gut. I've been doing it since last night when I got up to see if drinking a lot of cold water or throwing up might help.  I drank the water, but I couldn't hurl.  I had the confidence to try, though, and the faith in my body and in the evolution that produced it that allows the placebo effect to become a real thing.  Believing you can handle anything makes handling everything a little easier.

When you break, you can heal into something stronger.  When you fail, you could learn something that will improve your life far more than succeeding.  Look for the silver lining.  For scientific support, consider that you're the product of evolution, and that means you're more prepared for everything than most creatures that ever lived.  For personal evidence, remember that last time you wanted things to be different, you made changes, and now they are different.  It's not a pattern you ever lose, at least not as long as you're still alive. We already enjoy a deeper level of preparedness, and you can enhance that preparedness, or you can cower and ignore it.