Sometimes there will be a special no tve that goes over catastrophes and disasters. The shows usually feature well researched disasters and come away with answers to the big questions. What happened? Who was affected? How did it happen? And why did it have as large an effect as it did?
The last answer is very interesting to me because, every system no matter how good it is will experience failure. Fault tolerance is the ability of a system to operate when one component of the system experiences failure or breaks down. A good system will acknowledge limitations and build fault tolerances through things like redundancy, back ups and fail overs.
Major disasters are often see in systems that lack high fault tolerance levels. When a system does not have failovers, backup and redundancy one misstep can cause huge cascading problems. One system that was bent but not broken during the global pandemic was the worlds supply chain. There were and still are some economic hardships because of the supply chain but the stores were not empty.
Sorry for the boring lessons about Systems and relationships I have just been thinking about failure more than usual and specifically failure on a personal level. We will try a lot of things in our lives and we will probably fail at many of them what kind of fault tolerances do we have in our lives? What does our support structure look like? Chances are high that you are part of someone’s fault tolerance plan and don’t even know it.,
A friend or family member maybe in the middle of a catastrophe right now and their reaching out to you is part of the disaster plan. So what do we do? I am not sure? First I think it is important to treat that person with kindness and love? Second see how you can help? (you can always help, even if it is just listening or pointing them to someone with resources you and the friend do not have). Thirdly and most importantly you have to listen and give them time? Do not be dismissive when they reach out to you they matter.
What if you are in the catastrophe? Help yourself as much as you can and never stop looking for help. Here in the United States 988 is the number for the suicide prevention hotline and there is only shame in not reaching out if you are feeling suicidal. Another place for help is 1 800 662 4357. There are people out there that want top help and are only a free phone call away.
The Corrigan Encore 