The question is not, What do I do now? The question is, Who am I now?—RK
Thirty years ago I was a young dad raising two boys and carrying a pager. That little black homing device clipped to my belt had nothing to do with my kids, however. It was there because I was a hospital spokesperson. If something happened after hours or on the weekend that prompted media inquiries, the pager would vibrate, and within minutes I would be on the phone with the charge nurse who was running the entire hospital.
My colleagues in the external affairs department and I tried to prepare for such moments. Each month, a group of us would meet for what we called “issues management,” where we tried to imagine the worst things that could happen to a hospital and decide what to do about them, including what the statements to the press should say.
Our planning mantra was: What’s the real crisis? Say, for example, a hospital pharmacist was struck and killed by a truck outside the hospital, which was right on the city’s main thoroughfare. That could prompt an outcry from the community about worker and visitor safety, and rightly so. But what if the police found the pockets of the employee’s lab coat stuffed with stolen drugs? What’s the real crisis?
I’ve never forgotten that lesson. On more than one occasion, the attitude that the crisis at hand might be preferable to what it could be has helped me stay calm in some hairy situations.
More important, though, I think this attitude can also be turned inward to ask, not what is the real crisis, but Who is the real me? There is only so much we can do about a crisis at any given time and in any given moment. I’ve often wondered whether the question becomes, not What do I do now? but Who am I now? Events and time change us. We learn and we grow every day, but crisis accelerates the learning curve. Perhaps one way of coping with unwelcome circumstances is first, to appreciate that one is growing by leaps and bounds even as the crisis unfolds, and second, that understanding who you might be developing into and who you might be becoming can help you know exactly what to do.
To put it in bumper sticker rhetoric, it’s not WHAT WOULD JESUS DO but WHAT WOULD I DO? And that “I” you speak of is the person you are growing into through something that might be called spiritual annealing. Like the process that alters glass or metal to be less brittle and more flexible, spiritual annealing involves a heating up period—that’s the crisis—and a cooling down period—that’s self-realization—that leaves you more adaptable and better able to handle stress.
I noted earlier that carrying a pager had nothing to do with my kids, and while that may be true, the 24/7 worry that that device symbolized, especially on weekends, did affect them. I was always awaiting the next hospital crisis and worrying that I would get misquoted in the press and then face the real crisis—namely, losing my job. In some respects, that device made me an absentee dad. Yes, I was with my sons at the playground, the indoor gym, the fencing class, and then again, I wasn’t.
But I didn’t stay that way. I handled a school bus rolling over a guardrail and all the students coming to our ER. A hockey arena full of students and parents getting monoxide poisoning from a leaking Zamboni machine. The CBS news magazine 48 Hours suddenly showing up at our hospital entrance one day—to cite a few disasters that came my way back then. I survived. My world didn’t end. I kept my job. My spirit hardened, then softened. I grew. We all do.
So right now, and as so much around us seems to be falling apart, remember that if you are here—and you are, or you wouldn’t be reading this—that you have made it through all the other disasters, and you were strengthened by them. Hardened and then softened to forge ahead but with compassion. The key is to remember that you are already becoming the person you need to be to get through the current mess. Just also remember to stop and be thankful for the person you were. They got you this far, and if it weren’t for them, you wouldn’t be here. You had to be them before you were you.
Spiritual annealing. I like that, and will carry it with me. Thank you Rob.