Tragedy averted

​I’ve been thinking about the tragic story of the woman in Florida who lost her life after entering a pond and being attacked by an alligator.

I’ve been to Florida more times than I can count. I’ve traveled all over the state, visited Gatorland, and even stopped at one of those small alligator farms near Lake Okeechobee where they raise gators for visitors. If you’ve ever been to one, you know exactly what I mean when I say they’re loud… and they have a smell all their own.

But here’s what stands out to me.

For more than twenty years, every single trip to Florida came with the same warnings.

“Stay away from the water.”

“Don’t walk your dog near the edge.”

“Never assume there isn’t an alligator.”

The signs are everywhere. The locals repeat it over and over. It almost becomes background noise because you hear it so often.

This woman’s death is heartbreaking, and my heart truly goes out to her family. I don’t write this to blame someone who can no longer tell her side of the story.

I write it because it made me wonder about something we all do.

How often do we become so familiar with a risk that we stop seeing it as a risk?

Whether it’s alligators in Florida, flash floods in Arizona, icy roads in the Midwest, or rip currents at the beach, the people who live there every day sometimes become the most comfortable with the very dangers visitors are warned about.

Maybe that’s just part of being human. We adapt. We normalize. We convince ourselves, “I’ve done this a hundred times.”

Until that one time.

It’s a sobering reminder that nature doesn’t care how long we’ve lived somewhere. It doesn’t know if we’re lifelong residents or first-time tourists. It simply follows its own rules.

And maybe that’s the lesson—not to live in fear, but to never become so comfortable with a known danger that we stop respecting it.

It made me think about all the times I’ve looked back and thought, “Well…that could have gone really badly.”

Fortunately, most of us get those second chances.

So now I’m curious…

What’s something you’ve done that, looking back, makes you wonder what you were thinking? Maybe you ignored a warning sign, took a shortcut, got a little too confident, or simply had one of those “it’ll be fine” moments that somehow actually was.

I’ll start. I’ve done plenty of things over the years that make me shake my head now. Thankfully, they’ve all ended with a story instead of a tragedy.

Your turn…