Emergency

It could have been worse, I suppose: the wifi could have failed.

But life can get on top of us, and when that’s compounded by emergencies, our sense of equilibrium can slip. It helps to realise others are going through more. We could be homeless in Chicago on the coldest day ever, or face heaven knows what in a war zone. But that only helps so much.

Jordan Peterson, the controversial clinical psychologist, talks about emergencies, a word deriving from “emerge”, as in chaos suddenly rearing its head out of what we took to be, or hoped was, a dependable system.

How can we be less vulnerable to emergencies? That’s the subject of his very long book, subtitled “An Antidote to Chaos”, so there’s no easy answer.

One plea he makes, though, is to “pay attention!”. Look for signs of emerging chaos and mount a robust response, now. (Turns out my friend’s boiler was old and tricky and he’d been nursing it along.)

The link with delegation is that we can’t do everything on our own, and so mounting a robust response will entail enlisting competent help to do something big and out of the ordinary.