Rescue Journal

storm jumping

Carol  ·  Nov. 24, 2012

one of the hardest things about rescue is...the intensity of it all. life and death....crises....fix it or do this now....the immediacy of it all is hard.

i live in the eye of multiple continuous human or animal or mechanical, technical, moral, ethical, legal, or administrative type storms.

imagine a darkend landscape with twister after twister raging across every view and then you can imagine the sometimes overwhelming multi- intensity of rescue. if you are too late to jump into one storm, an animal might die ...jump in too late or too quickly or not good enough into another and a human may hate you forever...time limited, life altering opportunities may pass you by because you did not act quickly enough or conversely, you might screw something really big up by acting too fast.

it is like a minefield. things you expect to blow up, may not..others you think are just simple and harmless, may blow and take off your leg.

the problem of course is there are only so many storms you can deal with at any one given time. some you simply have to let pass by or try to catch up with at a later time.

i can and do deal with a whole lot of shit in a 24 hour day but no one..i mean... no one single person... could possibly effectively and successfully, deal with everything in rescue that hits you constantly from every which way. i am learning not to get sucked into the panicked vortex of each and every storm. i am learning that sometimes some storms will leave some kind of destruction across my rescue landscape and whether i should have or not, i may have or may not, i could or would have or not...for whatever reason on that day... i did not.

i do post mortums on the worst of the storms when i fail, trying to pick up and examine all of the peices..others i just walk past the mini messes scattered around because they are still not a priority for me at that time.

it takes a very long time to really accept that you cannot be all things to all animals or people...that when god was handing out super person capes, he ran short before he got close to rescue.

i wish i could be the kind of storm jumper who could jump easily and efficiently to and from each and every storm and instinctively know which switch to throw to calm the swirling winds down. but i am not.

the only thing i am pretty damn good at is not getting sucked into the center of some twisting monster never to be seen or heard from again.

so..my advice to all would be rescuers is this..not all storms can be managed or tamed...either they are too big, or too weird or you simply won't have the time or the energy to get to them all.

oh well...suck up that you suck...deal with it or forget about it, which ever at the time is most appropriate. and then get back to storm jumping (or storm hobbling...) along. there will always be another mini or maxi storm waiting for you to jump into so you might as well get to it as soon as you can.

Comments

Shelley

A nice take on the old adage, 'You gotta pick your battles.' I've lately been realizing that many, many things in life are beyond me, so now I just say, "It's beyond my scope." Because it's true.

Penny

Well said, Carol. I think this applies to life in general, but so much more to rescue.