Enduring Sustained Uncertainty
Summary: Practical habits for coping with prolonged, unclear-timeline anxiety, drawn from Paul’s 1990-91 Desert Shield deployment — first applied to the early COVID-19 period, later republished and expanded as “The Strength of the Chain.”
Sources: LinkedIn Posts.md (“The Strength of the Chain,” posted 2025-11-25, Part 3 of Paul’s “When I Was in the Navy” series)
Last updated: 2026-07-11
In August 1990, Paul was in Haifa, Israel when Iraq invaded Kuwait, beginning Desert Shield — months of continuous anxiety about an unseen threat, anger at the governments involved, no clear resolution timeline, and worry for family who had no way to help. Writing in the third week of the COVID-19 pandemic, he recognized the same emotional pattern and distilled lessons learned in 1990-91:
- Don’t participate in the watercooler conversations that fuel anxiety. Commiseration feels good but doesn’t actually help anyone.
- Take care of yourself first. Sleep, hygiene, nutrition, and well-being are prerequisites to being strong for a team or family — “put your oxygen mask on first, then help others.”
- Routines matter. Define a clear start and end to the workday and make a deliberate pivot to after-work life.
- Build in deliberate “otherness.” Engaging the mind on something totally unconnected to the crisis (reading, art, music, games, puzzles) is therapeutic and makes the daily grind more bearable.
- Laugh. Joy and humor persist even amid bad news.
- Accept that things won’t go “back to normal.” People and organizations grow into the challenge and become something different — a new normal, not a reversion.
Later expansion: “The Strength of the Chain”
Republished on LinkedIn under the title “The Strength of the Chain” (a reference to The Laws of the Navy, stanza 5 — “On the strength of one link in the cable / Dependeth the might of the chain”), Paul broadened the source of the anxiety beyond COVID-19 to “economic volatility, geopolitical conflict, and the dizzying pace of AI-driven change” as a persistent, ongoing background hum for people and organizations.
The expanded version adds a sharper central claim: “you cannot be a strong link in the chain if you routinely break the promises you make to yourself.” Skipping self-commitments “just this once” becomes a pattern — the workout, the walk, the quiet time, the call to a friend are the first things to go under pressure, even though they’re exactly what keeps a person capable of carrying the load. Keeping promises to yourself is reframed as “operational readiness for being in relationships with others,” not self-indulgence.
Notably, this version is also where Paul first connects the “otherness” habit directly to his own hobby — blacksmithing — which he later turned into Blackthorn Workshop, his leatherwork and blacksmithing Etsy business. Blackthorn Workshop is a separate venture from Blackthorn Ventures, Paul’s InsurTech advisory business — the two share a name but not a lineage.