What Comes After Crisis?
Although on the surface it may look like things are ‘business as usual’ for many of us, the past month has been maddening, to put it mildly. I am surrounded by people in survival mode who have:
- Wondered whether we are alone in feeling persistent and overwhelming anxiety, reduced focus, lost sleep, and feeling a range of emotions from helplessness to rage.
- Used a lot of metaphors and expletives in the past month, for the lack of sufficient words to describe what is happening.
- Lost trust in formal authority figures, given up on official channels of information, and instead began getting information (and strength) from people with eyes and ears on the ground.
- Focused on what must be done, and let the non-essential tasks slide, switching to autopilot for routine activities.
- Trusted our own judgment about what we are experiencing over what we were told is happening.
- Experienced altered perception of time, feeling as if October 7th happened just yesterday, and simultaneously, as if this month has been never-ending.
These days, we have found comfort in each other, and many new friendships began with "What? You too? I thought I was the only one", as C.S. Lewis once phrased it.
As a researcher of uncertainty and extreme context, here’s what I see as coming next:
- As we develop familiarity with the way the crisis is changing our lives, it will feel like things are beginning to stabilize (not normalize yet, just stabilize). The intensity of ‘the feeling of crisis’ will gradually decrease.
- Yet, we will not return to ‘feeling normal’ compared to the baseline of what was happening before the current crisis. Instead, we will establish a ‘new normal’. We may stay on higher alert, and adopt new routines compared to the pre-crisis life, and these new ways of being will eventually become normalized.
- Our surroundings will normalize as we put new rules and practices in place, figure out new routines, re-establish (or establish new) authority figures, and gain skills to deal with the ‘new normal’.
- Reliable data will become more available, from the sources the credibility of which may be newly (re)established. While this data may not necessarily change anyone’s minds, it will provide the material for those who wish to understand the situation.
- After crisis, red flags, or early warning signs of the next (inevitable!) crisis, will be noticed as deviations from this ‘new normal’. Learning to recognize, understand and predict the likely trajectory of the early warning signs can buy essential lead time to respond to the next crisis faster, potentially making the difference between life and death. Make it your business to understand what the ‘new normal’ is like, and stay attentive when ‘something feels off’.
While we may have a sense of certainty at times, actual certainty remains as unreachable as the horizon line; uncertainty is the default universe which we inhabit – we can’t get out of uncertainty any more than we can exit the universe. In the ocean of uncertainty, crises come regularly and inevitably as storms. We attempt to read early warning signs of the storms, to survive each crisis-storm by staying afloat, make sense of the way the storm changes us and our environment, and create new ways of being and feeling safer in this pervasive uncertainty ocean. You’ve done it many times already, and inevitably, you’ll have many more times to go, for as long as you live.
Today in particular, and always, may you be safe; may you be well; may your difficult emotions and pain be held with compassion, without suffering.
If you need some help moving forward and making decisions during uncertainty, in crisis, and after a crisis, here’s where we can start: email me at Alina@AlinaBas.com. I can help, because it’s my life’s work, I am good at it, and I love this work.
With gratitude,
Alina
Dr. Alina Bas, Strategy Consultant & Executive Coach
https://AlinaBas.com/schedule
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