What would you take?

My wife doesn’t have many photographs from her childhood. When she was young, her family had to leave former Yugoslavia in a flash when war broke out. They had minutes to pack whatever they could carry. As a result, only a handful of pics of her as a young girl remain.

It’s sad that so many wonderful pics of her and her brother, parents and friends playing and smiling and being 4-year-olds are lost forever. Pieces of her childhood now exist only in her memory because, when the circumstances forced them to decide what mattered most, big boxes of photographs couldn’t compete with safety.

I’ve been thinking about this over the past few days as wildfires have raged through parts of the Okanagan in Western Canada. It’s an extremely serious situation that strikes close to home. People are being forced to evacuate, and moments like this must come with tremendous fear and stress.

Amongst all of those emotions, these poor people have to also ask themselves a similar question to what my wife’s family had to ask in the early 90s: What should we take?

It’s a question none of us want to face. I can’t imagine someone knocking on our door right now and telling us that we had 5 minutes to leave. We don’t know when we’re coming back. We don’t know what will still be here when we do. We have the car and whatever we can fit inside it.

What do we take?

It’s a challenging question because most of us spend so much time trying to create certainty. We insure our things. We plan and build routines. We check the forecasts. Some of us even make 5-year plans. These are good things and help us build a way forward. But events like wildfires and war remind us of exactly how fragile life is. It also shows us how fragile our sense of control is.

A fire changes direction and the wind picks up. Or we get that phone call. A diagnosis arrives. The company restructures. Perhaps even someone we love dies. Our partner says “we need to talk.”

That’s when that carefully constructed version of how we thought life was going to unfold disappears. It might be in a flash or it might come as a slowly building horizon. Either way, it forces us to deal with one of the great challenges of being human: craving certainty in a world that simply doesn’t offer it.

What wouldn’t we take?

The opposite question is also a good one, because it instantly clarifies what is truly important. We probably wouldn't grab most of our clothes. We wouldn’t take the 65 inch TV. We also wouldn't take the argument we've been replaying in our head. We wouldn't take our job title, our LinkedIn follower count.

All of a sudden, an enormous amount of what consumes our emotional energy becomes completely irrelevant. Which raises the interesting possibility that many of the things that feel incredibly important to us aren't actually important at all.

We tend to operate inside a strange world of importance: the meeting feels important, that deadline is critical, the promotion will make us happy, the right house and car feels important. Even winning an argument feels important!

Some of these are important in the moment, but we tend to give them extra importance that is unnecessary when the context changes. When life is ticking along normally, we rarely stop to question them.

Until life forces us to.

This is also where resilience gets interesting. It’s never been about convincing ourselves that everything will be ok, because often life is not ok. In fact, I can guarantee that plenty of things in our lives are not going to go the way we planned. The real opportunity is to have the confidence in ourselves that, whatever happens next, we trust ourselves to meet it.

We can still be full of fear and grieve what we’ve lost (perhaps even angry at the unfairness of it all). But it also means accepting that uncertainty is part of the deal and, no matter what comes next, we'll find a way to move with it.

A couple of tools to help.

1. Would this make the car?

   This is a quick test. We ask ourselves: would this make the car? If we had five minutes to gather what mattered most, would this problem, disagreement or worry come with us? If not, perhaps we can loosen our grip on it for now. Not everything that feels urgent deserves to become important. When we’re given just minutes to evacuate, the hierarchy changes very quickly. And there’s something strangely calming about that clarity. The sudden stripping away of everything unnecessary forces us to let go.

2. Decide before the fire.

   If things are confusing or stressful, we can write down the five things that matter most to us right now, then look at our calendar, our attention and our emotional energy. Are they receiving the best of us? If not, perhaps there’s one small change we can make this week to bring our lives a little closer to what we say matters most. It’s possible to remember what really matters in our lives without the evacuation order.

So, what would we take? And can we decide that before the moment arrives? Because resilience can also be the ability to distinguish importance from urgency before life does it for us. That way we know where to direct our energy.

Until next time friends, stay safe and stay resilient.

Carré at Resilient Minds

PS - If you’re in Vancouver, I run monthly events designed to bring great people leaders together to discuss how to help us all operate at our best. The next one is all about navigating anxiety that comes with this new world of AI. All details of this event and future events can be found here.