Day 36 & 37: Emergency Preparedness

Last night's blog post was derailed by an emergency, with my good friend falling on wet stairs and losing his two front teeth! This involved a lot of blood, the emergency room, and very little sleep last night. Luckily, he will be fine and it could have been much worse, but this was still a fairly significant injury. Needless to say, this was not how I had expected to spend my night. I was mostly calm, helpful, and not trying to fight the fact that the night was so unpredictably unpleasant for my good friend and myself. This reaction was in sharp contrast to an experience from earlier in the day involving the New York City subway system, which was the blog post I had planned to write last night before my friend's accident. I had been heading to his apartment in the afternoon and had my travel plans altered by a closed subway line. This unexpected inconvenience meant I had to take three subway lines instead of two, and took me an extra half an hour to get to my friend's apartment. Unlike the true emergency later in the night, this slight inconvenience left me feeling extremely agitated, frustrated, and stressed. Even though I knew that it was not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, my level of agitation felt disproportionate to this minor change in my plans.

I'm great to have along if you get into an emergency situation, but if you are stuck in traffic or lost I tend to have a bad attitude. This left me wondering why I react so differently to these two types situations. Why did I feel so much more negatively toward the slightly bad experience of a closed subway line rather than to the legitimately scary one of a serious accident? I like to plan everything ahead and make great logistical plans, so when they go awry, I get very frustrated. However, in a true emergency I feel calm and focused because there is a problem to be solved and I can't indulge in self-pity or wishing things were different, I just have to act.