What Mumbai teaches us

PODCAST [click to listen] – What we can learn from the attacks on Mumbai

Yesterday, in Mumbai, hundreds of people who were quietly living their lives found their world turned upside down when Islamic extremists attacked the city in up to  17 coordinated incidents.  As many as 100 people are dead and hundreds were involved.  Hotels were burnt, people were terrorised.  For some this was a blow for freedom, but for so many others their world is no longer as safe or as predictable.  They will marked for life by their experiences.

As human beings, we need to know that if we do X that Y is the likely consequence.  If external agencies intervene and introduce a random chaos factor, how are we to gauge what is safe, and what is not?  We invest our time and money in things that seem sensible and safe, but if this equation is disrupted, how are we to choose?

Change sometimes is forced on us by outside agencies and we are forced to reevaluate.  I wonder if they could wind the clock back 24 hours what choices those who were involved might have made differently had they known?  Would different things have seemed important to them?  We are sitting safely at home saying “Dreadful!”  We still have a real choice about what is really important to us….

“The key is not to prioritise what’s on your schedule, but to schedule your priorities.”  Stephen R. Covey

“Success is only another form of failure if we forget what our priorities should be.”   Harry Lloyd

Tags: Change, force majeur, priorities, terror

This entry was posted on Thursday, November 27th, 2008 at 17:30 and is filed under General, Personal Change, Values & Philosophy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.