Spring Flooding 2009
Apr 4th, 2009 by Liz Bennefeld
Looking South from the Main Avenue Bridge.
In a way, I am enjoying the change from the routine, even though I dislike the damage caused by the flood and spring snowstorms and regret the losses that people around me have suffered, including members of my own family.
Change is necessary, though, because it stimulates growth and creativity and thinking outside of common pathways. Even though change produces stress, it also, at times, allows for avoiding the common stressors of routine activities. If we’re always battling the same stresses, the same problems, and in the same environment, all the solutions begin to look the same, after a while. There’s nothing challenging about reapplying them, often with the same somewhat inadequate results.
For me, having a nonessential business that the city requested I not keep open during the emergency, because of wanting to cut down on traffic to minimize accidents, I have had time to think and do things about preparing for flooding, such as cooking easy-to-reheat meals, making sure there is drinking water, and getting the electronics and the more valuable books up from the basement. I’ve learned where the drains are, and how to turn off the ones that do turn off. There are tinned fishes and instant rice and potatoes and frozen soups, as well as hard-boiled eggs and toddy coffee concentrate.
More than anything, I am appreciating the unstructuredness of life under emergency conditions. I like going to bed and waking up at widely varying times, rather than structuring my life around a work schedule, as I had to for so many years. I like to take naps when I’m tired, eat when I’m hungry, and do things when I’m ready to do them, which means that stuff actually gets done. Now that a second and even higher crest is predicted for the middle of April, I find myself planning to take care of all sorts of cleaning and organizing tasks that I haven’t had the chronological space for until now. Lots of unstructured time! One of the greatest gift in life!
Another change I have noticed in myself over the past three or four weeks is a marked tendency to hole up and not say much of anything, as though my subconscious is working through data and keeping a lid on it until the process is completed and the outcomes are more clear. To quote one of my earlier poems, “I may not want, tomorrow, still to be / the person that I am today, / but written words create a mold / I’m trapped into / without a choice.”
Commitments should be kept, but for that very reason, commitments should not be lightly entered into. New commitments definitely should be avoided during periods of high uncertainty. Who we are, although, I suspect, the core is quite stable, changes over time. Some priorities change, while others remain the same. Subtle shifts in reality take place over the decades, until the similarities between the past and the present become tenuous, and what looks the same on the surface may at its depth bear little resemblance to what once was.
Consistency is not necessarily a virtue, to be sought after. Authenticity, honesty, and clarity of thought and feeling ( or intuition) are more important, and the actions that arise from them may not be consistent with who I was thirty or forty years ago. The consistency is in the authenticity of the present, rather than in a continuity of actions and,or goals.
I think I will think about this some more.