Thinking about the word ‘crisis’ today, because it gets thrown around a lot.
Economic crisis. Crisis of confidence. Health care crisis. Environmental crisis. Crisis of leadership. Personal crisis. Identity crisis. Mid-life crisis.
What’s the opposite? Because we don’t hear much about it.
If crisis is “disaster,” is the opposite “prosperity”? “Functioning”? “All systems go?”
If crisis is “catastrophe,” is the opposite “doing just fine, thanks”? “Status quo”? “Issue-free”?
Interestingly, one of the definitions of crisis is “change,” which leads me to wonder if it’s accurate to say, “What we have here is a crisis of change”? Or is that redundant?
At its heart, crisis is exactly that. Change is immovably, irrevocably inevitable, as is our instinct to dig in and say, “But not to me.” And when we face that change—or the necessity for us to change—what do we do? Why, we declare a crisis.
Some circumstances merit the word. A Katrina. A Haiti. Toxic sludge, toxic oil, genocide.
But what passes for a crisis these days is often a fear that our own circumstances might be affected. We may have to get by with less. We may have to do more. We may have to do something beyond contemplate our next purchase or plan our next vacation. Something may just grab hold of us and demand—because there’s no other choice—that we face some hard choices. We may be required to act on principles that spew so easily from our mouths as insubstantial words. There’s a word for that, too, equally abused. It’s called character.
