“We had a whole plan,” my mother (age 94) told me. “I would pick up your brothers and sister from school and drive from New York to Arkansas, where your grandparents were living. Your father would catch up with us there.”

It was October 1962. My parents lived in Rochester, New York when the news began about the “Cuban crisis,” later more fully called the Cuban Missile Crisis. It was very scary, my mother said. Were we about to be in a nuclear war? Was it the end of the world? No one knew.

My parents, like many, worked out a plan. My mother began purchasing non-perishables. (My siblings “joked” that they were eating spam for years after that, but I’m not sure it was untrue.) If war began and they survived a nuclear attack, they would get away from major cities, out in the country. If the attack on the US happened on a weekday, my mom would get the kids and wouldn’t wait for my dad to return from work, she’d get on the road immediately.

It may seem naive to us now. If there were a nuclear attack, spam probably wouldn’t have saved them. But what else can you do? We are humans and we want to survive, so we make plans.

Now, we are in a different scenario, where the scary threats come not from another country, but from within. We can buy nonperishables (to be honest, as someone accustomed to being in a hurricane zone, it’s not a bad idea anyway) but at this point, we don’t know what the genuine threat is.

As I said on Sunday, I’m putting some of my energy right now on three ideas that are centered on what I actually have control over:

• I am responsible for what I think and believe.
• I am responsible for how I align my life with what I think and believe.
• I am responsible for my reactivity.

This is where I have power – and I’m not giving that power away. And I’m not going to let fear rob me of the joy and purpose I can find in each day.

I actually found it comforting, hearing my mother describe that time, and their plans. We have gone through scary things before. We control what is within our control, and we continue living.

I’m gonna skip buying spam, though.