My mother is the kind of person who is supremely capable and pretty much unflappable. She’s the one in our family who fixes leaky toilets when they break, even though my dad’s an engineer. She’s a solver of problems big and small: she even woke us up in the middle of the night when our house was on fire because she smelled smoke before any alarms went off.
Her most valuable piece of advice to her most worried child? “Do not panic,” she’d always say to me, then repeat it for emphasis, drawing out each word slowly. “Do not panic.”
I even taped the words “Do not panic” scribbled on a Post-It note to the steering wheel of my car as a new driver. I don’t think it reassured any of my passengers.
But I’ve been thinking about it a lot these past few months during the pandemic. Things can get bad — really bad — but it’s true, I can’t think of one situation that’s been improved by panicking.
