Shift Your Perspective of Quarantine: An Analogy

Picture a small cruise ship with two decks and only one staircase to navigate between them. As passengers are going up this staircase, one of the stairs breaks, and one passenger falls and breaks his leg.

The Captain says, “I only have one crew member. She will fix the stairs, but she has to attend to this injured passenger first. Please all stay on the lower deck for now until she can be sure it’s safe to go to the upper deck.”

But everything the passengers want is on the upper deck — activities, a restaurant, a couple small shops, and of course the view is much better — so they start grumbling. After all, it’s only one broken stair.

Billy, the restaurant owner, says, “I know how to be safe; I don’t need anyone telling me what to do,” and he heads up the stairs. Billy’s absolutely right. He does know how to be safe, and he avoids injury. But . . .

Sally, who owns one of the shops says, “Well, if Billy can go up there, then I’m going too,” and she heads up the stairs. She’s quickly followed by a few other like-minded passengers, and then . . .

Other passengers see this going on and think, “The Captain must have lifted the restriction. Let’s head upstairs!” Pretty soon, most of the passengers are on the top deck. The problem . . .

All the “essentials” are on the bottom deck — the bathrooms, activity equipment, food stores, and the shops’ inventory. So, inevitably, passengers start going up and down the damaged staircase.

All of this is going on while the crew member attends to the injured passenger. And, soon enough, another passenger falls down the stairs and comes to the crew member with a broken leg and a broken arm. The crew member attends to both injured passengers, as best she can, which takes her attention away from fixing the broken stair.

In the meantime, a couple other stairs have broken, more passengers have gotten hurt, and the injuries are worsening. The crew member has left the ones who “only” have broken bones to tend to those with head injuries.

Then comes a passenger with a head injury who can’t speak very well and is experiencing numbness and blurred vision. The crew member has to devote all of her attention to keeping this passenger alive, while all the other injured passengers sit and suffer.

The last one to get hurt? Billy because he was as safe as could be. But by now, there’s no one left to lift him up off the ground, so there he lay, at the bottom of the staircase, waiting for help.

The moral of the story: be patient while the stairs are being fixed. Otherwise, all resources will be taken away from fixing them, making the situation much worse than it needs to be. Sure, maybe you are safe like Billy, but we all know that not everyone will be as cautious as you. And the Captain and crew member cannot dedicate their time to monitoring those people right now.

If you’d like to learn more about group influence, you might enjoy: Don’t Drink the Kool-Aid: 3 Cautionary Tales of Group Influence

Or maybe you’d like some concrete examples of privileges that many of us take for granted: Veiled Privileges to Be Grateful For

Or maybe you’d like to cultivate an abundance mindset: An Inspired Way to Embrace Joy: An Introduction to Delights

Click here for more posts with a “deliberate thinking” theme.

If you’re ready to Stop Settling & Start Living! check out our home page to learn more about what The Expectation Gaps has to offer.

And until next time . . . have a PERSPECTIVE-SHIFTING day!