Preparing for Possible Disasters—Don’t Forget to Train Your Brain

I got mad at Dan Rather in 1989 when he anchored the CBS Evening News from San Francisco after our Loma Prieta earthquake and said, “This was not the big one.” At the time, that 7.1 magnitude felt very big to us, knocking us out of our everyday orbit.

Now I understand what he meant.

From the molecular to the cultural level, life is a mix of expected and unexpected patterns of energy. You kinda know what’s going to happen and you kinda don’t. There are laws of nature that we and everything else in the universe must follow.

But those laws allow for quite a bit of wobble. Randomness is an inherent part of nature, necessary to make it work.

Our brains are hard-wired to learn patterns and expect them. We expect our world to behave in the patterns we have come to know. This is a good thing. I am an advocate of celebrating traditions, doing things as they have been done before, strengthening extended family ties, sticking with one’s same spouse, same job, same friends—reinforcing the bonds that hold us.

We need a strong awareness, appreciation and nurturing of traditional patterns to get us through the randomness that inevitably comes our way.

I told my mom that I was going to write about meditation as a tool for getting through an earthquake. She said, “I don’t think anybody is going to meditate in an earthquake.”

As usual, she was right, but I meant practicing mindfulness meditation before an earthquake, as a means of strengthening one’s ability to be present when things are changing very rapidly. 

Mindfulness meditation is the practice of focusing one’s mind on current reality. You learn to feel reality as it is happening in the moment. You turn your attention toward anything that is happening in the here and now, such as your breathing. To practice, you take five or more minutes a day to be quiet and be aware of your breathing.

Gradually, with practice, you develop the ability to be present, an ability that can come in handy during a crisis.

We can learn from the Japanese, many of whom meditate, about grace under pressure. Mindfulness meditation is a way to train your brain to deal with rapidly changing reality.

Also, by training yourself to recognize here-and-now reality, you can learn to relax and enjoy normal life, when a possible disaster is only imaginary.

About This Column: Each week Pam Walatka will explore life in Los Altos Hills. Contact Pam at pamwalatka@yahoo.com or see the Pam Portugal Walakta Official Page on FaceBook.