I Am Not a Cat

Every so often, nature provides humanity with a profound and unexpected gift.

Consider the distance from the Earth to the Sun: much closer, and life as we know it is burnt to a crisp, unable to exist; and much further away and liquid water doesn’t exist on the surface.

Earth’s wonderful magnetic field keeps it from shedding its atmosphere out into space, and it keeps harmful cosmic radiation from bombarding us to death. We may owe a thanks to Theia for this.

66 million years ago, mammals on Earth were given a surprise present: the Chixclub asteroid, which wiped out most of the dinosaurs.

There was a long ice age our ancestors lived through, toughening us up and shaping our reasoning and survival skills over more than a million years. Then, about 12,000 years ago, much of that ice melted away and the planet warmed up enough for us to thrive.

And, in February of 2021, as the world was perplexed by a pandemic, one of the greatest gifts ever given to humanity fell right into our laps, lighting our darkest hour:

It’s legitimately impressive that I still have a hard time keeping a straight face if I’m sharing this with someone for their first time

The saying “Never let a crisis go to waste” is often attributed to Winston Churchill, but the idea is certainly much older. Machiavelli, the OG crisis inversion doctor, believed that a leader should be ready to use any given situation appropriately in order to maintain power and stability. This very much included crises, when the very largest opportunities were often presented.

During the pandemic, lots of awful things happened to the world, and I was not immune to all of the turmoil. There was a lot of pain and suffering, some of which was close to my own life. I was very happy to see the world begin to recover as vaccines rolled out and global immunity began to build, and the world today looks very different from 2020 or even 2021.

In the midst of the tough times, some folks were able to make some really positive moves, like changing from a crappy, low-paying job to a much better position that pays better. Some are in a tougher spot, while others are better placed at work.

Many have learned to reconnect with their families and loved ones. I see tightly knit families who lived through something rough together, and they have the confidence that they can get through pretty much anything now.

When you lift weights, you’re stretching and even tearing (just a little bit) your muscles, so when they recover, they’ll grow back stronger in a few days. Similarly, carrying weight can help your bones to become more robust. A broken bone will even heal back stronger than it was before breaking.

Sometimes, trauma makes our psyches stronger. Living through something tough means we have to be innovative and creative, too—remember all those substitutions for hand sanitizer or masks folks were scrambling to accommodate in those early days? Maybe more to the point, consider how quickly the MRNA vaccine was developed. Only in such a pressure-cooker environment would something so incredible emerge.

Sometimes we get great things from a crisis, and sometimes we just get some amazing laughs.

Can you think of any times in your life when you were able to make something good happen during a crisis? If examples from history come to mind, what are those?