The way home in hurricane chaos is to aim for the higher arc and the macro end game

Hi folks –

Below I share a moment of thoughts on Friday ask I packed up my wee car and headed home to St. Petersburg to unwrap whatever surprise gift the second hurricane may have given me and my already flooded home.

If I can say anything in this process of evacuation, finding shelter when little shelter is available, and in handling the vortex-like black hole that is the time suck of one’s home after a hurricane, the big game is wrangling chaos. This is a marathon, not a sprint. Every time you go to your trashed home, and even when you try to get away, it pulls you into an endless stream of demands. Contractors, already overworked, show up an all hours, and not the hours you’d planned, and not when you are already there. But you must see the process forward and keep running the race against mold.

I see the way forward and it required fierce discipline. But it’s a discipline I’d already implemented years ago as part of my KindEdge.com process. You must treat the day as a lop-sided mountain. You must do a tough, steep climb earlier in the day than anyone else is willing to do. Wake early. Achieve all your big rocks first: dog feeding and placement into daycare when possible (leaving my pup in a strange hotel room alone all day, and bringing him to a wrecked area full of sharp objects and disease-covered grounds and waters are worries for me), get all the lists and plans and tasks and uploads and responses done early. Then work out and work out hard. The exercise of carrying myriad boxes into storage and such is not what our stressed bodies really need. Our stressed bodies need a long, rapid jog, or a rigorous hot power yoga class, or, my specialty, a tough weight-based ballet class. You need to sweat and you need to force large volumes of blood to run through your brain and your muscles. This turns on signals of growth and cell replacement in your body. And this is good. Then you need all the other key elements of sunshine, outside air, movement, interaction with others, and nutrient dense whole foods with no sugar and little to no carbohydrates. You are not in business as usual. You need to imagine you are a soldier at war, thinking far ahead of the dangers of any injuries or weakness in your body or mind. Fill up all your tanks early and often. The flooded or trashed home will always be there asking for more.

Plan and Execute Strategic Stuff First: Tactical Hell Will Find You On Its Own

Author Robert Greene warns us of the dangers of getting sucked into tactical hell. Meet the contractors, answer the questions, be reactive in the moments of high value and high return. But do not sit around at the wifi- and power-devoid home all day just to move object about like chairs on the titanic. You must step away, collect thoughts, and plan your approach for the next 5 – 7 days. Your plans will inevitably be shifted by urgent calls to meet a worker or inspector at your home. But if you drive forth the high value strategic and self-sustaining actions early each day, you have an 80% chance at checking all those boxes. When you’ve called all the repair contacts, and secured the next few days’ hotels, and uploaded all the insurance claim documentation, you have all that data and activity working for you while you are, later in the day, being reactive and distracted back at the house.

Cheers, cin-cin and hugs, @MarySueIRL