Low diatribe

We've entered the Hoth Era in my part of the States — two significant snowfalls in as many weeks, each dropping more than six inches. Both times, the pattern has been identical.

The snow falls. I get on the interstate and immediately fishtail. My hands grip the wheel. Every muscle tightens. For the rest of the day, I drive like my grandmother is in the passenger seat holding a tray of hot coffee with no lids. Hyper-aware. White-knuckled. Every lane change calculated. Every brake tap deliberate.

Within 48 hours, the plows have done their job. The roads are clear again. And I go back to giving driving just enough attention to get where I need to go.

Here's what's easy to forget: driving itself is an absurdly complicated procedure. You're piloting a two-ton machine at highway speeds while simultaneously tracking the vehicles around you, reading signs, monitoring your speed, adjusting for road conditions, predicting what other drivers might do, and probably thinking about what you need to pick up at the grocery store. The fact that we can do this at all — that we can automate most of it into background processing while holding a conversation or listening to an audiobook — is remarkable.

Growing up in the midwest, driving is a way of life. I got my license as soon as the DMV opened on my 16th birthday and have been driving ever since. Nearly 40 years of positive reinforcement — the fact that I've survived every attempt thus far — has ingrained a deep sense of "I know how." I've internalized the physics of the everyday. I know how hard to brake, how much to turn the wheel, how the car will respond when I do. It's all reflex now, refined by decades of repetition.

And then the snow falls, and none of it works anymore. The universe stops behaving according to my experience. I tap the brakes and the car keeps going. I turn the wheel and nothing happens — or everything happens at once. The physics I've spent two-thirds of my life internalizing are suddenly wrong, and I have to override every backgrounded process and actually think about driving again. Every movement deliberate. Every response calculated. The complexity that was hidden becomes visible.

It happens every year. The months of driving under normal physics overwrite whatever I learned the last time the snow fell or the rain stood on the road. Every winter, it's like learning to drive all over again.

That level of attention is exhausting. You can't sustain it. Within 48 hours, the plows clear the roads, the physics return to normal, and my nervous system gratefully hands control back to those 40 years of muscle memory. The backgrounded processes take over again. I stop white-knuckling the wheel.

The vigilance doesn't fade because I decide to stop caring. It fades because the emergency passes, and I can't maintain that level of conscious override indefinitely. The crisis forced me to pay attention. The resolution allowed me to relax. Both responses are automatic. Both are human.

This is the pattern we live inside — not just on winter roads, but everywhere.

A security breach happens, and suddenly everyone's updating passwords and enabling two-factor authentication. Three months later, we're reusing the same password across five accounts because remembering them all is exhausting.

A project nearly fails, and the team commits to better communication, tighter check-ins, clearer documentation. Six weeks later, we're back to assuming everyone knows what everyone else is doing.

A health scare hits, and we swear we'll eat better, sleep more, move our bodies. A month later, we're eating ice cream at midnight because we stayed up finishing one more thing.

Crisis precipitates change. The emergency creates the conditions, the resolution removes them. We don't backslide because we're weak or lazy. We backslide because the environment that demanded vigilance no longer exists, and our attention naturally redistributes to whatever feels urgent now.

The question isn't how to stay in emergency mode forever — that's unsustainable and exhausting. The question is: what do we build while we're paying attention that can survive when we're not?

The crisis does something valuable: it exposes the parts of our systems we've been taking for granted. The snow reveals that I've been assuming good traction. The security breach reveals that I've been assuming my password is enough. The project failure reveals that I've been assuming everyone knows what I know.

Those assumptions work fine until they don't. And when they break, we get a brief window where the hidden complexity becomes visible and we're motivated to do something about it.

After the first snowfall, I didn't just drive carefully. I threw a blanket and a flashlight in the back. I made sure my phone was charged before I left. I checked the tires. Both sets on our vehicles are fortunately new — unrepairable flats earlier in the year forced replacements that felt frustrating at the time but became an unexpected bonus now. Those things stayed useful even after the roads cleared. More importantly, they made the system more resilient the next time the assumptions broke.

That's the work: using the heightened awareness of a crisis to build structures that don't require constant vigilance to maintain — and that make the system stronger when the next crisis hits.

In teams, that might mean turning the panic-driven communication into a standing ritual — a weekly sync that happens whether things are on fire or not. It might mean documenting not just what went wrong, but what we were assuming would go right. It might mean building redundancy into the places where we've been relying on a single person's knowledge or a single point of failure. It might mean automating the thing you swore you'd never forget to do manually again, because you know you will forget.

This isn't about perfection. It's about resilience. It's building systems that can handle the next time the physics change, because they will.

No amount of preparation will prevent the next crisis. The snow will fall again. The unexpected will happen. But we can use that reaction — the moment when everything becomes conscious and visible — to be better prepared for how we react the next time. Not to eliminate the crisis, but to have better tools when it arrives.

The vigilance will fade. That's not a failure — it's biology. But the systems we build while we're paying attention can outlast the attention itself.