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The Panic Button
The plans that take us out of short-term crises almost always proceed like this. A strategy that works well one moment is useless the next. That's okay. Keep moving. Keep letting go of expectations. Keep your attention on the here and now, and keep adjusting. And finally, refuse to contemplate the distant future until the snafu is over. Cancel lunch, obsess later about the social fallout. Look in the yellow pages under "flood repair" without wondering how much it will eventually cost to replace your carpet.
The difference between unthinkable disasters and short-term crises is that if you follow these instructions, life snaps back to being surprisingly normal surprisingly quickly. Think what that deer must have felt as he roamed the aisles of Target, wondering why the humans were forcing him toward a wall of glass and metal. Imagine his gratification when he finally triggered the door sensor. That's the way a minor crisis ends. It's almost anticlimactic: You look up from the one step that has your full attention and realize you're out of the woods. Or, if you're a deer, back in the woods. Back, in any case, to the world you're used to, where snafus are typical and things occasionally get fubar, but where you feel in your DNA that things are exactly as they should be.
Martha Beck is the author of The Four-Day Win (Rodale).
From the April 2007 issue of O, The Oprah Magazine
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