What the Water Left Standing

Last Sunday, a flash flood hit our town. I walked into my studio and found it underwater. Brown water past my knees, iMacs half-submerged, and a back wall collapsed from the surge. Ten years of equipment, collections, and belongings sitting in mud.

My first instinct wasn't a plan. It was a gut punch. I stood in the doorway for a long minute just looking at it.

Then I did the only thing that actually works in a moment like that. I stopped looking at the whole mess and picked one thing.

That's the part nobody tells you about crisis. You don't solve it. You can't. The scale of it will flatten you if you try to hold it all in your head at once. What you can do is find the next right action and take it. Move the surviving hard drives first. Call the insurance company. Get a fan on the one wall that isn't ruined. None of that fixes the studio. All of it moves you forward.

I've built a career telling clients to find the one true thing and build from there. Turns out that applies to flooded floors as much as brand positioning. Clarity in a crisis isn't about seeing the whole path. It's about seeing the next step clearly enough to take it.

Resilience gets romanticized. People talk about it like a mindset you either have or don't. From where I was standing, ankle-deep in mud, it looked a lot less like grit and a lot more like sequencing. Do the next thing. Then the next one. Don't let the size of the loss talk you out of doing something small and useful right now.

We're still cleaning up. Some of it's gone for good. But the studio is drying out, help showed up the next morning, and we're already well underway rebuilding the space.

Crisis doesn't ask if you're ready. It just shows up. The only real choice you get is what you do in the next five minutes.

Pick something. Do it. Then pick the next thing.