(Tom: This is a stellar example of situational awareness. It was a post on Quora.com, one of the social media sites of which I am a member. You can post questions and other members will post answers.
1. You cannot be this aware when you are drunk or stoned. Hence I do not drink or do drugs.
2. You cannot be as aware of your present time environment if your attention is hung up on past losses and upsets. I have read that the average person has 70% of their available attention units stuck in the past and only 30% available to them in present time. This is why I have devoted a good portion of my life to recovering attention units from past mistakes and failures.
3. You cannot be this aware of a natural environment if your total experience of life is digital.
It takes knowledge of an ideal or normal scene, accurate observation of the existing scene, analytical comparison of the two, certainty of your observation, intelligence to conceive of a handling, decisiveness and personal integrity to follow through on a survival plan despite objections.)
The Post On Quora:
Have you ever had a really bad feeling about a place, and immediately abandoned what you were doing, and got the hell out of there? Tell us about it.
My Grandfather in 1959.
He was with a group planning to camp in Yellowstone park. They had no sooner started to set up camp then he demanded, in his loudest, most demanding German fashion, they leave. They did.
That night the earthquake hit. The entire campground was buried. Where he was camped, there were no survivors.
The friends and family he was with grumbled all night about his irrational behavior. He made them drive for several hours before stopping. They felt the ground shake, but had no idea how bad it was until they heard the news reports.
The following day, they no longer grumbled.
Grandpa said it “felt bad,” he then noticed “a wrong silence” and the complete absence of birds. He also said there were no ants on the ground.