It is happening again.
As I write this, Sri Lanka is moving into another period of fuel scarcity, queues forming, uncertainty spreading, the particular low-grade anxiety of not knowing how bad it will get or how long it will last. I recognise this feeling. I lived inside it for months in 2022 during one of the worst economic crises the country had experienced in decades.
I am not Sri Lankan by birth. I came here as a wife, as someone who chose this country through love and wonder and the particular faith of someone who follows a question without knowing where it leads. And when the crisis arrived in 2022, it arrived as my crisis too, not in the way it arrived for people who had grown up here, who had family histories woven into this land, who had more at stake in ways I will never fully understand.
But it was still my life. My daily reality. My months of uncertainty.
I have been thinking about what that season taught me. Not the practical lessons, those were real and I will share them, but the deeper ones. The ones about what I actually value, what I can and cannot control, and what crisis does to the person who lives through it attentively.
What It Was Actually Like
Living Inside the Uncertainty
The fuel queues were long. That is the fact everyone knows. What is harder to convey is the waiting, the hours in line not knowing if the station would run dry before you reached the front, the calculations that became part of daily life, the way a full tank of petrol became something to feel genuinely grateful for.
Power cuts ran for fourteen hours a day at their worst. Fourteen hours. The rhythm of daily life reorganised itself around the schedule, when the power was on, you worked, you cooked, you charged everything that needed charging. When it was off, you adapted. You found the candles. You discovered which tasks could be done without electricity and which simply had to wait.
I walked to the grocery store. In a season when so much felt out of my hands, the walk was something I had chosen, something my body was doing deliberately in the world.
And then there was the announcement from the Department of Health, a plea to the public to please try not to get sick. Because the hospitals were prioritising ICU patients. Because the system was at capacity. Because if you could manage your health at home, they were asking you to.
I sat with that sentence for a long time. Please try not to get sick. It was not cruel but t was honest. It made me ponder on the fragility of the systems we depend on, the thinness of the infrastructure between ordinary life and genuine crisis, the degree to which our sense of security rests on things continuing to function that are not actually guaranteed to continue functioning.
What the Crisis Taught Me
Uncertainty is the default. Certainty is the exception we forget to appreciate.
Before 2022, I had lived with a background assumption that most people carry without examining, that tomorrow would be roughly like today. That the petrol station would have fuel. That the power would stay on. That the hospital would be available if I needed it.
Not because I had thought carefully about these things and concluded they were reliable, but because they had always been there, and things that have always been there stop being noticed.
The crisis removed that background assumption. And what I found underneath it was not dread but something closer to clarity. When you cannot assume continuity, you start noticing what is actually present.
The power is on right now. The meal is cooked. The walk happened. The work got done. Gratitude stops being a practice you perform and becomes something you feel, because the alternative, taking it for granted, is no longer available to you.
What this means now
As it starts again, I am trying to carry that clarity forward rather than letting it fade when conditions improve. The power on right now is not nothing. It is something worth noticing.
The line between what you control and what you don’t is the most clarifying line you can draw.
I could not control the fuel supply. I could not control the power schedule. I could not control government policy or global oil prices or the length of the queues. Spending energy being angry about these things was an option and I watched some people take that option, and I understood it completely, and I also watched how much it cost them.
What I could control was smaller and more concrete, my schedule around the power cuts, the distance I was willing to walk, the work I could do offline, the reserves I kept at home, the way I spent the fourteen hours of power cut.
Focusing on the small circle of what was actually mine to manage did not make the larger situation better. But it made me more functional inside it. It gave me somewhere to put my energy that actually changed something.
What this means now
This is a lesson about being honest with yourself about where your agency actually begins and ends, so that you do not waste the limited energy you have on things you cannot move.
Crisis strips your life down to what is essential and what remains is worth knowing.
When you cannot move freely, when the power is unreliable, when your routines are disrupted and your assumptions are suspended, what remains? What do you find yourself protecting, prioritising, returning to even when everything else has been made difficult?
For me, the answers were clarifying. Work that I could do from home, independently, without depending on infrastructure, that mattered. The ability to walk somewhere on my own two feet, that mattered. Connection with my husband, the particular texture of a life shared in a small space during a difficult season, that mattered enormously.
The K-dramas I watched in the evenings when the power comes back, the writing I kept doing even when the power cut meant working on battery. These things, which might seem small, were what I reached for when reaching was difficult. That is information about what I actually value.
What this means now
A crisis does not create your values. It reveals them. It removes the noise and shows you what was underneath all along.
A life that can adapt is more valuable than a life that is comfortable.
I had built, over the years of freelancing and living abroad and navigating transitions, a life with a certain amount of built-in flexibility. I worked online. I did not depend on a single employer. I had learned to find rhythm in disrupted circumstances, first in Brunei, then in the early years of Sri Lanka, then in the transitions of building something new from scratch.
The crisis tested that flexibility and found it, not perfectly, not without difficulty, but essentially intact. The work continued. The income continued. The daily life adapted. And what I took from that was not pride but something quieter, the understanding that adaptability isa form of security. Not the kind that comes from stability, from a guaranteed salary and a reliable system and everything working as it should, but the kind that comes from knowing you can reorganise around whatever arrives.
What this means now
That kind of security is slower to build and harder to see. But it was the kind that held in 2022. And it is the kind I am continuing to build.
What Crisis Reveals
The Questions Worth Asking When Everything Is Stripped Back
One of the most useful things the 2022 crisis did was force a kind of triage, not just of resources, but of attention, energy, and priority. When you cannot do everything, you find out what you will do first. And that ordering is one of the most honest things about you.
The questions the crisis asked that I am still sitting with:
What did I reach for first
when the power went out and I had to choose how to spend the evening? What does that tell me about what I genuinely love?
What did I not miss
when scarcity made it unavailable? What habits had I been maintaining out of inertia rather than because they actually added anything to my life?
Who did I want to be near
when things were uncertain? Whose company felt stabilising rather than draining?
What work felt worth doing
even in difficult conditions and what work felt hollow the moment it became hard?
What did I discover I could live without
that I had previously treated as essential?
These are not crisis questions, but more of life questions. The gift of a hard season, if you are willing to receive it as such, is that it cuts through the noise and brings you face to face with what is actually true about how you want to live.
As it Begins Again
What I Am Carrying Forward
I am not afraid of what is coming. I want to say that clearly, not as performance, not as bravado, but as the honest result of having lived through 2022 and come out the other side knowing more about myself than I did going in.
I know what I need. I know what I can adapt around. I know where my actual security lives, not in the fuel station being open but in the flexibility I have built, the work that does not depend on infrastructure, the life that can reorganise itself without falling apart.
I also know what I want to pay attention to this time. The walk to the grocery store. The powercuts. The particular quality of a life that has been slowed down to what is essential.
These things are not disasters, but are opportunities to live at a different pace, one that, if I am honest, is sometimes closer to how I actually want to live than the busy, distracted normal that precedes and follows every crisis.
Intentional living is not a philosophy you practice when conditions are ideal. It is the thing that holds when conditions are not. The crisis does not interrupt the intentional life. It reveals whether you were actually living one.
If you are in Sri Lanka reading this, or anywhere in the world moving into uncertainty of any kind, I am not going to offer you practical advice about how many litres to keep in reserve or which generator to buy. Others can advise on those things better than I can.
What I want to offer is this: pay attention. Let the difficulty show you something. Ask the questions that only scarcity and disruption make urgent enough to actually sit with. And notice, in the stripped-back, essential, slower life that crisis temporarily forces, what is still there. What you reached for first. What you did not miss. What turned out to matter.
That is the lesson. Not how to survive the crisis, though you will survive it. But what to carry forward when it is over.
Go Deeper
What Does Crisis Reveal About You?
Whether you are in Sri Lanka right now or navigating a different kind of scarcity or difficulty, these questions are worth sitting with.
Journal Prompts: What Does Crisis Reveal About You?
1. When something essential was recently unavailable to you time, money, energy, freedom, what did you reach for first? What does that tell you about what you actually value?
2. What in your current life are you maintaining out of habit rather than genuine need or love? What would you quietly not miss if circumstances stripped it away?
3. Where in your life are you spending energy trying to control things that are not actually yours to control? What is the smallest, most concrete thing that is genuinely within your circle of influence right now and what would it mean to put your energy there instead?
A Final Thought
Sri Lanka is a country that has taught me more about living than anywhere else I have been. Not because it is easy, it is not always easy, but because it is honest. The difficulty here does not hide behind comfortable infrastructure. You feel the texture of life more directly than in places where everything is smoothed over.
I chose this country. I still choose it. And part of choosing it is accepting that it will ask hard things of me sometimes and that the asking, done with attention and without bitterness, will give something back.
It already has.
If this made you think about what you actually value, keep that thread.
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