Situational Awareness: Avoiding Escalator Chaos and Finding Happiness
Situational awareness is to be cognizant of your immediate surroundings and how your behavior - both decisions and actions - will affect it.
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At the bottom of the escalator he stopped. This was the only time (that I remember) of physically moving someone out of my way. He had to have seen the amount of people in front of him. Certainly he understood there was a crowd of people behind him. We were all at the same event. Now that we were being disgorged, he was part of that exiting mob. I put my hands on his shoulders and guided him off to the side. Whether he was angry about it I did not know. I was lost in the crowd before he could react. Hopefully he was grateful. Had he not been moved, I would have fallen on him and a great human pile-up would have ensued. That probably would've been pretty funny. The CCTV Footage would have racked up millions of views on the Socials.
Unfortunately this isn’t the first time I’ve experienced the sudden-stop phenomenon (although this was the most egregious). I've seen this happen many times: not only at the end of escalators, but when elevator doors open, moving walkways, getting off a ride at a theme park, busy sidewalks. Anyplace where, if someone suddenly stops, it will cause minor mayhem for those in their immediate surroundings. This is called Situational Awareness - or, more accurately, lack of Situational Awareness.
SITUATIONAL AWARENESS
Situational awareness is to be cognizant of your immediate surroundings and how your behavior - both decisions and actions - will affect it. Situational Awareness has three interacting parts:
Perception: The recognition, evaluation, and triage of the sensory information of your present situation.
Synchronicity: Understanding and appreciating how your presence in the present situation is a part of your present situation.
Extrapolation: Anticipating what might happen by your own actions in the present situation.
For our dude going down the escalator he was wholeheartedly ignorant of what was happening around him, had no appreciation of his influence on others, and therefore was incapable of anticipating what might happen if he stopped moving at the end of a packed escalator.
Situational Awareness isn’t just for moving about the physical world (but for the love of all things good and true, please try), it also applies to how we move about in our own lives - on a broader scale. Check it:
Perception: The recognition, evaluation, and triage of what is going on in your own life.
Synchronicity: Understanding and appreciating how your presence affects the life of others.
Extrapolation: Anticipating what might happen by and through your own actions.
Finding happiness isn’t about getting lost in your own bubble. It requires Situational Awareness: a deep respect for the world around you and your place in it - lest you inadvertently create mass chaos at the bottom of an escalator causing the security guards watching the monitors to laugh their fool asses off.
SITUATIONAL AWARENESS POSTS
PERCEPTION:
You Are Exactly Where You Are
In the year 1707 a bunch of ships smashed into each other and sank causing the British government to offer a $25,000 prize (about $2 million today) to anyone who could develop a chronometer (a fancy clock) that could be used at sea (pendulums don’t work well being tossed around on a boat). After about 5 years a dude named John Harrison came up with a ch…
SYNCHRONICITY:
YOU HAVE AN IMPACT
The world is a crazy, chaotic place. Got it. Are we just standing there watching the craziness swirl around us? Of course not! We are in there. We are a part of it. We add to the madness. Why would we do that? What would possess us to make things more nuts? Wouldn’t it be far better to try and calm things down, to bring some sort of sanity to madness?
EXTRAPOLATION:
Control Your Destiny: Have A Plan
So you want to control your own destiny, decide your own fate, and make your own luck? Well, you've come to the right place. We already know that nothing is impossible and everything we do is a process of processes. Combine the two and you end up with a series of processes to achieve the impossible.