These kinds of experiences make me wonder how I would fare
if we had a prolonged power outage.
Today was easy – it was an adventure.
It didn’t take us long to grab our car keys and head out for
breakfast. The outage was very localized
so there were lots of places to go.
But a widespread, long-lasting loss of electricity – what
would that look like? I can’t even look
back to the time, a few summers ago, when much of eastern Canada and the
northeast States went black – some places for days. We happened to be on vacation in Central
Canada at that time and just heard the news reports. Even if we had been at home we would have
been only mildly inconvenienced – the power was back on in less than a day.
There would be a big difference, though. Back before electricity was a given, life
unfolded just as it always had – that was the norm. To give up electricity now would be giving up
something I’d always taken for granted.
It would be a backward step instead of the norm. I don’t know how long it would take to
realize that it was the new normal.
Jim and I had to really think about what we were doing this
morning – we were automatically flipping on light switches that weren’t
working, going to open the fridge door, closing a door and blocking out the
street light that was inexplicably still burning on the other side of the
street, turning up the thermostat that wasn’t even recording the temperature –
everything was automatic. How long would
it take to unlearn all those automatic gestures and learn new ones that are so
much lower tech?
Personally, I’m in no hurry to find out.
No comments:
Post a Comment