Who is Ever Ready?

 

We weren’t prepared.

We were just not prepared.

Had we known that this may have been the outcome, we would have prepared more for it.

We were not ready for this sort of catastrophe.

I’ve heard similar words ring out so many times in the last year, I think that it has become the motto of life. Not being prepared.

Who is?

We weren’t prepared for the devastation of Covid 19, the deaths, the sick, the deaths just by proxy. My mother was one of them. Stay in your house, we told her. She succumbed to pneumonia. My fear was her dying of a blood clot from lack of exercise. But in the end, her lungs couldn’t withstand it. When the doctor had told her less than a year before that she had Pulmonary Fibrosis, she never assumed she wouldn’t make it to the following summer. None of us were prepared. How could we prepare? We didn’t, we grieved, we struggled, we walked through it and dealt with it because that’s all we could do. We adapted.

Winter Storm 2021. An estimated 3.2 million Texans without power. They weren’t prepared. I know I personally bought firewood and food. My husband covered the pool pump, covered the outdoor spigots, turned the indoor faucets that were on the exterior walls to a drip, opened cabinet doors so they would stay warm. Put towels down at every door to help with the draft. Several things we thought that would make a small difference. But is that enough to be “ready” for such a storm? We live in a place that has snow every five years…a light dusting. So many families without power, heat, a way to get food, their pipes freezing and busting. People dying.

People weren’t ready.

We are never ready, no matter how much we think we can prepare. Some of us were lucky, period, because we didn’t lose power. That’s it.

You’re never ready enough for anything…you just take it. You either adapt or you fall.

Adapting has been a word I’ve been focused on for the last month. I envy my husband at his skill to adapt. My environment has to be “ready”, “prepared”, “controlled”. If I can’t have those things, I can’t survive. But the truth of the matter is, I can, we can, survive more than we know. All by simply adapting. When you push against change, it can swallow you up. But when you ride the wave of change, you adapt and realize that it may have been difficult, but it flows more naturally. In the end it will all be the same…but it won’t be so heavy during the process. I find myself amazed at how much we as humans can endure, even when we’re not prepared.

I think it’s time for me to learn to ride the waves and adapt.

“It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.” ~Charles Darwin