Take Notes During The Emergency

Getting wise from how we get through

grey water distribution site in Asheville after Hurricane Helene, an effort organized by volunteers with nozzles 3d-printed by the Asheville Tool Library, photo by Ryan Smolar

What breaks through tragedy is sometimes so amazing it verges on the miraculous. Our stories are soaked through with awe; like how the bookstore transformed into a hub for toiletries and masks and wi-fi after the fire, remember that? How the park volunteers on their weekly rounds administered CPR to a man who had just had a heart attack (love you Joel)? Or how volunteers filled 250-gallon tanks with grey water so their neighbors could flush their toilets after the flood? And the smaller scale: the monthslong meal train knit together between friends. Helping someone who tripped on the sidewalk. Pooling funds with your block to help a neighbor make rent.

Tragedy, emergency, and chaos are our pressure cookers for new ways of working together. We rearrange our lives, our physical spaces, unearth skills we forgot we had, and do something amazing. But when the emergency is teaching us its lessons, are we listening? Or do we let those breakthroughs languish in that wrong time, wrong place?

One problem is that the stories of what people can do together in emergency are just so good, they reach a mythical status. A Paradise Built in Hell describes this treatment as one that distances communities from realizing our true capacity, creativity, and resilience after disaster. The weakness of myths is that they were true then (assuming they happened at all), but not now. They exist to inspire us with the spirit of what they stand for, but aren’t to be applied literally to our daily life.

What a waste of energy! What a waste of group genius. What a waste of the only good to come out of all that bad: the fire, the pandemic, the loss, the violence.

It’s so easy to remember emergency as the exception. We have some very good reasons for this:

• It’s painful to remember the emergency, and possibly traumatic

• Whatever we did together was difficult to do or unsustainable to keep doing, maybe because we no longer have the time, proximity, or resources (i.e. funds raised, meals cooked) we did then

• We simply don’t have to do what we did anymore now that things have returned to normal; and maybe this message is loudest from the world itself

• The emergencies never stop for long enough for us to reflect at all

Through it all, the magnetism towards normalcy – even if it is a melty, unreliable normalcy – draws us forward with such force that it almost doesn’t matter if any of the above is true. Our survival itself is the golden nugget we escape with, the rest of it a bad memory.

I believe that starting here, where it is just plain hard, or plain overlooked, always makes it more possible to move through and into action.

So how might we extend our incredible feats of community strength, of invention, of creativity during the hard times into something beyond?

Take actual time to debrief

It’s wildly easy to rush back into normalcy, but it’s first worth pausing to ask: what made that [insert amazing thing] possible? How did it logistically happen? How did it feel for us? What would we change if we were to do it again? It can be a conversation over dinner and a notepad, or a more formal audit – how much money did we really spend printing up those rapid response flyers? – or group reflection.

Find the nuggets if not the whole enchilada

Just because a mom lifted a car once in an emergency does not mean she is going to do that daily, and that’s gotta be okay. But hey, now she knows just how strong she is! Or put another way: if your whole friend group pulled together childcare for a week while your friend was in the hospital, this might not be possible to continue at the same intensity after she is home and healed. But even so, there are most definitely learnings that came out of this experience. What do we know now that we didn’t before? What can be taken forward? What can be modified to be sustainable?

Tell about it

Community discussions, evergreen resource websites, getting your friendly online local news guy to do a video on your pay-it-forward hot dog stand. If you didn’t read the rest of that story from earlier, New Haven is now offering free CPR trainings through the library system specifically as a civic skillbuilding offering inspired by an almost-tragedy. Spreading these skills and stories – even if the initial response itself doesn’t repeat in the same way – is a way to pass on the spark to someone else.

Explore what it might look like in the everyday

Maybe it’s about frequency, or impact (maybe the entire store can’t stay dedicated to aid distribution, but there will forever be a free clothes bin now), or switching up leads. What is the smallest possible continuity? Ok, what if it was 20% bigger than that?

Replicated enough times, we start scaffolding our daily lives with an alternative way of being forged in these awful flames. Our emergency responses become less of a one-time exception, and more like a door into actual reality. It’s all possible – we just need to attend to the infrastructure to carry these lessons forward.

There’s a thought someone shared with me the other day about what people do when the times get tough, and our tendency to brush these off: “Those weren’t workarounds; they were breakthroughs!”

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p.p.s. Have you called the hotline yet?