Notes From My Knapsack 1-6-22

Notes From My Knapsack 1-6-22

Jeff Gill

St. Murphy, preserve us

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Perhaps you've heard of St. Murphy, the apostle of low expectations.

No, he's not real, but the reality of low expectations leading to less disappointment certainly sums up 2021.

Tony Hillerman wrote a whole autobiography titled "Seldom Disappointed," from an impoverished Oklahoma rural upbringing through World War II and ultimately a successful career as a journalist and professor, let alone as a best-selling author. But in his youth, he learned that it was essential to keep your expectations in check.

That approach can sound somewhat depressing, except for how Hillerman made it clear that low expectations keeps some mental and spiritual space open for occasionally being pleasantly surprised. You aren't always going to get pleasant surprises in life, not even every day, but if you're open to the possibility while working with that which is — the unpleasant realities and everyday inconveniences — you might even be surprised by how often you'll be pleasantly surprised.

Murphy's Law says "whatever can go wrong, will." Finagle's Corollary adds "and at the worst possible time." Most engineers and technicians of my acquaintance tell me they live by these principles right up there with OSHA and NIOSH. If you're a devotee of St. Murphy, you expect stuff to break or wear out or not work, and when things do go right you're properly thankful for the occasion, as opposed to expecting that as a usual outcome.

More importantly, you are more likely to be prepared in advance for adverse outcomes when you expect them. You will seldom be disappointed at yourself by making ready for problems. "Be prepared" is the Scout motto, and always having two sources of illumination in your baggage on the road, or checking your tires and oil regularly, and keeping an extra coat and gloves and even a blanket in the back seat during the winter: you may never need them, but when you do, you're going to feel very thankful indeed that you put them there. A power outage in a strange bedroom, a breakdown on a lonely stretch of road, unexpected occurrences along the way can best be dealt with in advance, or at least better than in the moment when unprepared.

On a broader scale, this is why we have an NIH and a CDC for the national interest. We can debate, and no doubt will, how ready those agencies and scientists and bureaucrats were for the arrival of a "novel coronavirus," but the record shows that people like Anthony Fauci said years ago that their greatest fear looking ahead was something like what just happened. In the same way, journalists and even a few politicians talked in the 1990s about their concerns over what would happen in New Orleans if its levee system got a direct hit from a hurricane. It wasn't unanticipated, but we were unprepared . . . or at least not as prepared as we could have been.

How could we have been better prepared for COVID? I honestly don't know, but I know we need to look into how well we were prepared (which may be better than we think we were) and how we could have been better prepared (which likely would have been expensive, which always has to be taken into consideration).

Meanwhile, what will the rest of January look like? Let's just say . . . I have low expectations. But I'm open to being pleasantly surprised.

Jeff Gill is a writer, storyteller, and preacher in central Ohio; he's a big believer in being prepared. Tell him about your expectations, great or otherwise, at knapsack77@gmail.com or follow @Knapsack on Twitter.