 Skiers and snowboarders love to practice their craft in the mountains immediately following a heavy snowfall. The light snowflakes form what is known as powder. Although still enjoyable to ride long after the snow is compacted, powder is preferable for skiing. Powder quickly disappears through melting, and compaction as other skiers move over the snow. Powder days are those hours that you can be in just the right place, at just the right time to experience these perfect conditions.
“How do you set up your life and work to be here today?” That is my question to anyone riding the lift with me on my first trip to Wyoming, USA. One was retired. Another owned a moving company. The baggy jacketed 40 something snowboarder wouldn’t answer the question but said he lived on the edge of Snow King resort and was fighting to return the area to community ownership and access. Many are on vacation from the east coast.
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 As a long time humanitarian response professional, I’m someone who likes to look on the bright side. My professional focus for over two decades has been on places and situations around the world where things are not going well, and help from the outside world is required to help people survive and rebuild from natural disasters and wars.
My professional career has focused on responding to disasters outside of my home country of the United States. When the COVID 19 pandemic hit the world a few years ago, that type of disaster came home, and my family and I experienced the pandemic in a personal way. It was an immediate experience that is not possible when you are working as an outsider in a foreign country.  United Nations peace keepers, Portuguese Battalion escorting us to the airport, Central African Republic 2017 Decision fatigue is the mental strain and depletion caused by making a decision. Decisions require cognitive processing. Even the smallest decisions can consume mental energy. Decision related stress is not always a bad thing. Positive stress, or eustress, is essential to making us stronger and facilitating growth. In the same way that muscles adapt and strengthen in the days after a run, the mind can also grow, and acquire experience, after a set of decisions or a period of heavier cognitive load.
As social sector professionals, we are often working in environments where massive events like an earthquake or a war overtake all good decision making processes, and we are reacting in the moment using immediate feedback based on accrued experience and past mistakes. And yet even in these critical environments, there is space to make the best possible decision based on the information available.  Hi folks! The pandemic disruptions put Social Sector Titan posts on hold for a while. The Pandemic changed our family’s work and life structure. I took that disruption as an opportunity to step back from regular posting and adjust to the new way of working and living in the Pandemic era.
The pandemic story continues. The virus lives on in different forms and we who lived through that time period survive and move on to the next parts of our lives. I’m documenting and sharing my personal experience to gain mental clarity on last year, and connect with others who might have good ideas about the experience. We also may need to move back into lockdown mode if the virus variants gain force. We will all then need to re-use some of that hard won learning for a second round of the COVID battle. |
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August 2026
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