apocalypse « Robin Writes

Do you go or stay? Prepare or slack off? Watch the market obsessively or check now and again? What does that mean, anyway?

I’m no expert on the stock market, although once when it fell to me to choose a few mutual funds for investment, they did really well. Probably dumb luck, even though I did some research beforehand.

But I’ve listened to experts, and an up-and-down market usually means one that’s going down . . . way down. At some point. No one, really, can agree on that point.

Plus, there are other things in play, like the Fed and interest rates, the international markets, China, and more. So, well, your guess is as good as mine. People were saying “September,” and now some are saying “No, October is the month!” Others say “some time in the next year.”

Okey dokey then.

As per my opening sentence, I don’t recommend watching the market obsessively, but it doesn’t hurt a bit to pay attention.

And you definitely shouldn’t slack off on prepping—prepping isn’t only good for an economic collapse, but also for natural disasters, or man-made disasters. You never know . . .

Go or stay? Again, when the balloon goes up: when the store shelves are less than fully stocked; when large groups of angry people gather nearby—and “nearby” is relative. When a nuke goes off, anywhere in the world.

As always, it’s your choice. Hey, if you leave and it turns out to be nothing, you can always come back, right? It’s not a lifelong sentence of being on the run or out in the woods.

So relax. Be attentive, but relax. Keep your focus on the end goal, but enjoy what you have right now.

Remember, though, don’t expect or wait for mainstream media to give you directions. I always think about how there are often events here in STL that I never seem to hear about in time to make plans to go or to purchase tickets—usually the story follows the event, ya know?

Keep that in mind.

But like with many things in life, there is no point in obsessing over this. You don’t know, you can’t know, and you might not know until it’s imminent. Like your health. Or the future.

Anything can happen.

Relax. Know that you’re prepared to deal with whatever comes.

We were getting ready to go to our first client’s home for the day. The TV was on and our youngest was playing on the bedroom floor. The older kids were at school.

My husband called out, “Hey, what’s going on? Looks like a plane just hit a building in New York!”

I came out of the bathroom just in time to see the second plane hit the World Trade Center.

We stood there, staring, trying to make sense of it. For almost an hour.

We wondered if we should pick up the kids from school; we wondered if we should go to work.

I called our client and asked if we should come—she said sure, why not? I couldn’t tell her.

We managed to gather our supplies and the three-year-old and left the house. By the time we arrived at the client’s house, she was glued to the TV.

Halfway through the job, we left. We couldn’t stay. She barely noticed.

We spent the next week, probably, watching TV and wondering what to do, if anything. We wondered what it all meant. What would happen next. We called friends who flew, making sure they were safe.

My mother was stuck in France. No flights.

Every year on this date, things are tense. Here, I mean. At home. Not just across the USA. It’s an overall feeling of doom, a sense of waiting and watching. And remembering.

Even fourteen years later.