Here’s a great example of what happens when you use Truth Testing to check in and see what’s optimal.
A few weeks ago, we decided to schedule a night or two to take the kids camping. We’ve been tent camping a few times this summer, but this time, we wanted to rent a cabin, to make it all easier (and rainproof! August is a pretty wet month in Colorado.) There was only 1 cabin available for 1 night in August at our favorite family campground, so we checked in with pendy to see if it was optimal. It was, so we booked it.
While we were there, we got an emergency alert call from our local town. Castle Rock has this nifty system whereby they can send voicemail and text blasts any time something major happens in the town, for the purposes of public safety. Since the program was installed several months ago, we have had only 3 emergency alerts (2 Amber alerts, and then this most recent one).
Connectivity is crap at the campground (which is fine by me, I’m not camping so I can get online so it could go out completely and I wouldn’t mind one bit) so when my husband got the message, he told me, “there’s an emergency in Castle Rock, but I have no idea what it is, I can’t understand the message because it keeps breaking up when I try to listen.” Since we had the kids with us and our property is heavily insured, I shrugged and forgot about it.
Then, the next day, Andy tries again and his eyes grow wide when he’s listening to the message. When he hangs up, I said, “What?” and this is what he says:
“A mountain lion was spotted at [the school right near our house, just across the park].”
“A mountain lion?” I ask, stupefied. “Right by our HOUSE?”
He nodded. “Yep. The police were warning everyone to keep kids and pets indoors until the lion moves on.”
“Holy crap.” We live in a highly residential suburban area. Usually the mountain lions stick to open space — if you’re lucky, you might spot tracks or scat while hiking trails, but we’ve lived here about 8 years and I’ve never seen one before.
But that made me very grateful that we decided to go camping out of town on that particular night.
Can you imagine?
This is such a great example of “thank goodness for my pendulum” but the simple fact is that Truth Testing can help enhance your life in many, many ways. Avoiding mountain lions is just one of them.
BTW – we later found out the lion was stuck in a tree. The authorities were called to help it down and return it to its usual habitat. Is that wild, or what?
