When Doing What Works Matters More Than Doing What’s Perfect

A reflection on leadership, compassion, and learning to act when it counts

There are stories that shape you loudly—traumas, triumphs, moments everyone points to and says that’s when it happened.

And then there are the quieter ones.

The ones that don’t get documented.

The ones that feel almost imaginary because no one ever thought to write them down.

The ones that explain you more than any résumé ever could.

This is one of those stories.

In 1995, the rain didn’t scare me—it thrilled me.

I was a sixth grader—awkward, observant, and just old enough to notice when the adults around me were worried without fully understanding why. My sister was afraid. My mom moved through the house with that clipped, efficient urgency that meant she was holding everything together by sheer willpower.

School disappeared. Schedules loosened. Life narrowed to whatever mattered in that exact moment.

I loved hurricanes—not the destruction, which I wouldn’t understand until much later, but the pause. School disappeared. Schedules loosened. Life narrowed to whatever mattered in that exact moment.

Hurricanes turned ordinary days into long stretches of shared time—snacks instead of meals, board games instead of routines, and a strange sense that nothing existed beyond right now. It felt like adventure disguised as disaster.

That summer, Hurricane Erin had already torn through the Florida Panhandle. Power outages lingered. Routines were disrupted. Just as things were being stitched back together, the forecasts shifted again. By early October, Hurricane Opal was strengthening fast in the Gulf, and Northwest Florida braced for another hit.

By the time Opal arrived, the rain felt endless.

Forty days and forty nights is how it felt.

It had been falling for weeks. Not dramatic bursts—just relentless, soaking rain that blurred the edges of everything. Forty days and forty nights is how it felt. The sky pressed low and heavy, like it had decided to stay.

We lived in base housing on Hurlburt Field. The front door faced Highway 98, and the sliding glass door opened up to the backyard and the park behind our duplex—the place kids usually played when the world was normal. During the storm, the front of the house was all urgency: wind, water, the sound of rain rushing across Highway 98 in waves. The back of the house was where we watched.

That’s where the squirrel entered the story.

On the low stucco privacy wall between the backyards—a short wall meant to give duplexes the illusion of separation—a mother squirrel appeared. She was soaked, frantic, and moving with purpose. She had three babies.

Whatever calculation animals make in moments like that had already been made.

Her home was a large tree just past the neighbor’s yard—close enough to feel reachable on a normal day, impossibly far in a hurricane.

One by one, she carried her babies over the wall, gripping fur and concrete and instinct with everything she had.

She made it with two.

The third was left behind.

He clung to the wall with his entire body flattened against it, tiny claws gripping stucco as rain battered him so hard it felt impossible that something so small could survive. The mother didn’t come back. She couldn’t. Whatever calculation animals make in moments like that had already been made.

That’s when I cried.

Not quiet crying—full, chest-deep sobs. I pulled at the sliding glass door, convinced that if I could just get outside, I could fix it. My mom yelled—sharp, scared—about how dangerous it was. The wind. The debris. The pressure. Picture Twister, minus the cows—but not by much.

My sister was terrified.

My mom was overwhelmed.

I wasn’t afraid at all.

I cried because every instinct in me wanted to intervene—and I couldn’t.

So I watched. I watched the way children do when they have no control over anything—like my stare might somehow hold him there, like my tears might keep him anchored to the wall long enough for his mother to come back. I cried as if watching hard enough could count as doing something.

Time blurred the way it does when you’re a child and everything feels urgent.

I don’t know how many hours—or how many versions of that day—I watched him cling to the wall. Time blurred the way it does when you’re a child and everything feels urgent. I only know it was long enough that by the time the storm finally broke open, he was weak. Still alive, but tired. Holding on had cost him something.

Then the noise dropped.

The rain stopped.

The world cracked open.

We were in the eye of the storm.

Sunlight poured down—clear, warm, unreal. For the first time in weeks, the air didn’t feel heavy. The sky above Okaloosa County wasn’t gray or moving or threatening. It was blue. Perfectly blue. And when you looked straight up, you could see it: the inner wall of Hurricane Opal, a towering ring of clouds encircling the calm.

Parents—fried from fear, confinement, and exhaustion—finally let us outside.

Children came out slowly at first, blinking and cautious, like little mice sniffing the air to see if it was safe.

I didn’t run to play.

I ran to the wall.

The baby was still there—alive, exhausted, pressed flat against the stucco where he had been holding on for far too long. His mother was nowhere in sight, and now that I could finally move, the urgency hit all at once.

He was alive, but he wasn’t safe.

The first thing I did was grab a long stick. I reached gently, urging him toward the nearest way down. It wasn’t easy. He didn’t want to go. He was terrified, clinging to the last place he believed his mother might return to.

Eventually, he jumped.

He ran along the chain-link fence and climbed a much smaller tree closer to our yard.

That’s when I panicked.

His mother’s tree—the real home—was still farther away. He was alive, but he wasn’t safe.

So I made another plan.

Lunch was some kind of snack. I don’t remember what it was. I only remember breaking it into pieces and laying a trail at the base of her tree.

The mother squirrel appeared again—thin, starving, and moving cautiously. Looking back now, I realize she had probably chosen her babies over herself during the storm, feeding them while she went without.

She followed the food willingly.

I led her slowly, step by step, from her tree toward the smaller one. When she heard her baby, everything changed. The chatter. The squeaks. The sudden certainty.

She didn’t even stop for the last crumbs.

She ran up the tree, grabbed her baby, and carried him home.

Only then did I run to play.

For one full day, life felt suspended

Behind the houses, children gathered in the park. We played like we had been released from something. We breathed deeply. We laughed. We moved our bodies just to feel that we could. None of us had power. None of us had plumbing. It didn’t matter.

Families grilled whatever food they had so it wouldn’t spoil. Snacks were shared. For one full day, life felt suspended—held gently in place by sunlight and quiet.

Then the calm moved on.

The winds returned.

The rain came back.

Hurricane Opal finished what it had started.

When it was finally over for good, what remained was damage, exhaustion, and the strange stillness that follows surviving something big.

There wasn’t time to process it.

Normal routes didn’t exist.

At the same time, the adults were solving the next problem.

School calendars were already out of mercy. Storm days were gone. Hurricane Erin had taken what it could, and Hurricane Opal had finished the job. Roads weren’t fully repaired. Normal routes didn’t exist.

I was still a sixth grader at Bruner Middle School, and school was reopening whether anyone felt ready or not.

Roads from Destin weren’t ready.

So the solution wasn’t perfect—but it worked.

It was just what you did when stopping wasn’t an option.

Middle school students coming from Destin boarded the Destin Sea Blaster, a bright, loud tourist speedboat designed for fun, not logistics. They crossed the water to Okaloosa Island, transferred to buses, and finished their commute to Bruner Middle School in Fort Walton Beach.

Backpacks.

Hurricane aftermath.

Homeroom.

It sounds absurd now.

It didn’t then.

When systems fail, absurdity stops being strange and starts being practical.

It was just what you did when stopping wasn’t an option.

Somewhere after that—in the middle of cleanup and improvisation, between grills still being used because power hadn’t fully returned and routines being duct-taped back together—a squirrel appeared at the front window over the kitchen sink. The one facing Highway 98.

He just sat there and stared in.

We laughed. We tossed him a few nuts. He came back the next day. And the next. When he finally got close enough to really see him, my mom paused. She noticed a marking—one she remembered from the baby squirrel on the wall during the storm.

We stood there connecting dots out loud.

The timing.

The size.

The mark.

This wasn’t just a squirrel.

This was THAT squirrel.

Once we agreed on that, the next step felt important. We took an official family vote on his name.

“Rocky” won.

I don’t remember fear as much as I remember momentum

Looking back, I don’t remember fear as much as I remember momentum—people choosing action over hesitation. Solutions appearing not because they were ideal, but because they were necessary.

I remember Highway 98 underwater.

The sky opening in the eye of Hurricane Opal.

A baby squirrel surviving.

Neighbors feeding each other and connecting in the worst of circumstances.

And middle school students riding a tourist speedboat to school.

Maybe because the moments that shape us most aren’t dramatic enough for headlines

You can call it the Mandela Effect if you want—something everyone remembers but no one can seem to find an article about. But whether it shows up in an archive or not, it happened. We lived it.

So honestly—why hasn’t anyone turned that into a Netflix documentary yet?

Maybe because the moments that shape us most aren’t dramatic enough for headlines—but they’re decisive enough to shape how we lead.

Those moments—improvising when the rules didn’t fit, choosing people over process, finding solutions that weren’t perfect but worked—stuck.

Those moments weren’t just memories. They were rehearsals.