The Art of Not Being Ready

Humanity spends a lot of time in preparation. When I was first given a watch, I was expected to do things when the arms of Mickey Mouse were in physically impossible positions - get dressed, get to school, get the books out... thus ended the era of the Bell, at least for a while. The era of staring at a clock or a watch had begun, and in the late 1970s - clocks and watches were still analog. Not the digital things that you can buy cheaper, and are easier to read. I imagine fighter pilots will have to find some new system to communicate vectors, since the young people now will hear 'Cover your six' and look at their wrist.

I don't know how much time I have wasted staring at clocks. At watches. At computers. At calendars. At other people who were late or early. How much time have I wasted by just waiting for... something. And within waiting, there is the implication of being prepared. If you're waiting for something, you're prepared for something to happen. The more prepared you are for something, the less likely you are prepared for something you don't expect. In survival training, they say you're supposed to have a knife, a belt, and a means of making fire on you at all times (will you survive a plane crash nowadays?). That's supposed to do everything for you.

Unless you crash on a glacier. Or into a glacier. It's always unexpected when something that wasn't prepared for happens - at least to someone. Hurricane Katrina was an excellent example of that, and something that they still haven't beaten the snot out of the dead horse on.

There's a trick to all of this, you see. The trick is to learn as much as you can about as much as you can as fast as you can. With me? Right. You can go to school, buy a certificate that says you're educated, trade it up and say that you're more educated, and continue to do so until you (and perhaps nobody else) believes that you are educated. You can wear a bow tie. You can toss letters behind your name like a trailer for a movie that isn't showing in cinemas yet. It doesn't matter. Sooner or later, something will happen that you are unprepared for. How you react is defined as emotional intelligence these days, and tomorrow they may call it Roger. It doesn't matter what they call it. It will mean the ability to deal with a problem that you haven't dealt with before.

Someone introduced me to a phrase when I was in the Navy as a Hospital Corpsman. It's Semper Gumby: Always flexible. Always ready for what you aren't ready for, and that's something I have become good at. You don't look for ready made solutions; you look at what you have and you do what you can with what you have. Being prepared is sometimes best called being unprepared.

Every day, we live our lives and unexpected things happen. We meet someone we like. We read something we enjoy. We meet someone we don't like, we hear something we don't like, it doesn't matter too much. Some of us stare at our watches as Time stares back at us and wonders what we're doing. Sometimes we have good days, sometimes we have bad days.

It's how we handle the unexpected that really counts. The rest we could write software to do, since monkeys would get bored with much of it. So my method is to try to use my time becoming prepared for the unprepared by being unprepared at all times.

Unprepared is a mindset. Being constantly unprepared leads to a constant need to continue trying to be prepared, not resting on one's laurels. Some might thing that it's Obsessive-compulsive personality disorder, but it's not. It's a matter of being relaxed when there is chaos. Unfortunately, it also means being stressed when there is too much order enforced. It means walking off the path, finding things others don't see and finding out the best estimation of truth possible - rigorously.

It means paying attention at a level that scares most people. Situational awareness, drawing on experience, 'is this something new' - and charging forward with the best odds. Maybe not characteristic of an INTJ to the layperson, but I think it is (because I consistently test as a pure INTJ). When everything around me is chaos, that's when I'm at my best. When I assume that I am unprepared. But am I prepared because I'm unprepared?

Study everything, and when the time comes let the odds sort themselves out. :-)