Change

People are drawn to spectacle and natural disasters make for excellent spectacle. It's as if the one-off-ness of a disaster like Hurricane Katrina excites people and it can sometimes inspire them to do a lot of good work and seize it as a chance to start anew. In the same fashion of appealing to peoples' taste for disaster, the media is also drawn to big spectacles. That's the problem with long droughts. They aren't sexy like hurricanes and floods and more shocking events, but their impact can be just as damaging as any natural disaster. What's the media going to show you? A field of dried grass? You'd be almost literally watching the grass grow, but in this case it's not growing.

This hurricane should open peoples' eyes to what a real crisis is and what real problems are. None of this quarter/mid-life, wine-sipping, significance, existentialist crisis stuff. We, the collective we of most of the people I knew while growing up, should be so lucky to have the choices we have and to ability to do nearly anything we want with our lives. And yet too many people with all those options bemoan them like a curse, like it's a burden to have choices. Maybe it is, but it's far preferable than having none. There's no disaster in having choices. The only disaster would be to freeze up so badly that you can't make a choice until a real disaster comes.

Why wait for disaster to make a change? What about kaizen, the Japanese principle of continuous improvement. Always be getting better instead of waiting for some momentous event to force a change. Give yourself a challenge to rise to if you need life to be harder, to be more of struggle, to feel more real.