"Adapt"

"Well, when my nephew came last summer we played a game with him called 'Adapt.'"
Harold: "Oooh, that sounds exciting! 'Adapt!' How do you
play that game?"
"The adults basically do whatever they want and the children have to adapt."

--Red Green

So I promised, a while ago, to write a second post about the decline I think America might have in store. I started to write a high-falutin' one about how people in dark ages manage to make beautiful things, etc., and then it occurred to me, as I started to enumerate attitudes that I thought would be helpful At Such A Time that said attitudes were always helpful. So you'll just have to take my word for it that, although anticipating a new Dark Ages might be alarmist, I'm not actually terribly alarmed about it. Talking about that would make the post too long. Instead, I shall talk about the attitudes, since they are helpful anyway and not alarmist. :)

The game "Adapt", which a lady I know who has a broken foot has been playing, is a very useful game, and this is the game we should all be ready to play. In other words, although you do a thing a certain way right now, what if you couldn't and had to do it another way?

A very easy one to play with is, say I had no electricity. How would my clothes get clean? Clothesline for the drying, natch; I'm not so jazzed about washing clothes in a five-gallon bucket with a plunger. I have heard recommendations on another blog that is no longer up to wring laundry that you must wash by hand in an industrial-grade mop bucket wringer. Since I love industrial-grade mop buckets (if one absolutely MUST have a mop bucket--I don't have enough moppable floor to justify one) this made sense to me. Will I run out and buy a mop bucket, just in case? No; but I bet that mop buckets are not going to be the first thing people mob onto in the stores in the event that our electric system becomes more like, say, Columbia's or New Orleans's and I could get one if I needed it. Anyway, I do have a five-gallon bucket and a plunger, currently on other assignments.

I think it's probably healthy to always play a little Adapt, even if you never have to actually adapt. I don't mean just things like how would you get along in an extended power outage, but also how would you get along if you had to move in with family, or they had to move in with you? How would you celebrate if you always buy an ice cream but now you can't afford it?

So the central attitude I think is helpful is, of course, "be ready to adapt." The others flow from this and can be treated in less lengthy form.

1) Don't expect the government to help you. It's not really their job, and at any rate they're not very good at it. (See: New Orleans reference above.) If you get help from them, awesome, but think of it as gravy and set about building relationships with family, friends, neighbors, and church folks. This is a much better hedge against eventualities than Social Security. Of course, don't depend on others either--depend on the strong Son of God, but I'm saying if you have a choice between which temporal things to form relationships with, go with the people you know rather than the state.

2) Remember that sooner or later there's always a blizzard. Or a flood. Or a glorious revolution. In other words, we live in a world of sin and sorrow, so preparation for the manifestation of sin and sorrow is a good thing.

3) That being so, always keep some necessaries put by. Food, medicine, lamp oil, Snickers bars, whatever you'd want during a week-long blizzard/flood/hurricane/civil upheaval. This is not alarmist, it's just how people have always lived until really recently when they started moving into apartments with microscopic pantries and great big TV nooks.

4) For Pete's sake, keep cheerful. That's been the hardest struggle with this foot o' mine--the temptation is to complain all day long because every time you go to do something, you're reminded that you can't do it the right way or the easy way. However, complaining won't make my life any easier, and it won't make my family's lives any easier, and it won't make the situation change faster, so all it accomplishes is that we are all that much more miserable. So don't fuss when you play Adapt. It means you lose 67 points.

5) Pray. This is one of those you-should-do-it-anyway things. I had a professor who was a flake but who was right a lot accidentally; she said that it's called a "spiritual practice" because you practice it in daily life so it's there when you need it. Ignoring the fact that spiritual practices that are solely for our own benefit are probably not valid, it makes the point that it will be a lot easier to rely on the Lord for hard things in the eventuality if we rely on Him for less-hard things right now. Try trusting Him for the grocery budget or your irritating second-cousin who is coming to visit, and then I imagine it won't be quite as hard to trust Him if you ever find yourself in Corrie Ten Boom's shoes, hiding Jews in the upstairs closet.

Now I must go read to Miss Boo, so that's all for today.

Cheers,

Breanna