The Law of Requisite Variety

My husband and I were talking this morning about the utility outages in our area due to the freezing temperatures for four days in a row.  It is so easy to blame one person or another for a freak of nature that rarely happens in our area.  It has been so hard on families to go without electricity which causes problems with heat and water.  It is almost like the chicken and egg.  Did the electricity go out because of problems with gas and then the water went out because of problems with electricity or was it the problems with electricity that caused...... You get the idea. 

It is so easy to place blame on the other person or entity.  This reminds me of what one of my Neuro-Linguistic Programming teachers taught us about the Law of Requisite Variety.  That law states that people will do the best they can with the resources they have available to them at any point in time.  So if we had known that the predicted low temperatures were going to drop so low and last for so many days then perhaps more could have been done to prevent all the problems. 

It all depends on our outlook on life.  There are many choices we make related to how we go through life.  Do we want to give the other fella the chance or do we need to blame.  It really is a choice.  So let's chunk it down.  What if we decide that everyone involved dropped the ball and should have done a better job so we didn't have the problems.  They should have known there would be problems and they didn't do anything about it so now we are stuck.   How does that make you feel?  Or you can decide that everyone did their best and the problems were beyond anyone's control.  Does that make you feel better or worse?  There we go again with choices. 

I learned a long time ago that you can't should have done something.  It is impossible to operate in the past and there again we are faced with the choice of how we deal with life.  So we have the question we must ask ourselves, how is that working our for me?   If it makes you feel better then go for it but if it doesn't then make a different choice.