That was a heavy week around here. Wednesday we talked about active shooter events and the numbers behind them. Thursday we spent on why I do not teach Run, Hide, Fight, and then on how to keep somebody from bleeding to death. I do not enjoy writing those. I write them because they are true, and because a plan that skips the hard parts is not finished. But I want to say something about what this is supposed to feel like, because I think a lot of people have it backwards in both directions. - Some people won't prepare because they don't want to think about it. That's most of them, honestly. The subject is unpleasant, so it gets avoided, and the avoidance gets called optimism. ***And some people go the other way and think about it constantly.*** They read every hard thing they can find, and it becomes the only lens they have. That's not readiness either. That's just fear with a hobby attached. - Here's the thing neither group has figured out. Training is what makes thinking about it bearable. Not because you file it away and move on. You don't. It stays on the list, the same way the truck and the animals and the roof stay on the list. But the person who has actually practiced putting on a tourniquet thinks about bleeding differently than the person who has only read about it. Not less. Differently. With something solid underneath, it instead of dread. That's the whole trade. You don't earn the right to stop thinking about it. You earn a better way to think about it. - Which brings me to the part I want to push on. Once is not training. I see this constantly in schools. They run the required drill, check the box, and consider the matter handled for the year. Compliant, and not remotely capable. The staff turns over, the substitutes were never included, and nobody has touched it since September. Families do the same thing. We have the conversation once, feel better, and never come back to it. ***These are perishable skills.*** Every one of them. A knot you tied last spring, a tourniquet you practiced in a class two years ago, a meeting spot the kids agreed to in March. All of it fades, and it fades quietly, so you don't notice until it matters.