Another motivation for meditation

An emergency is not the time to learn a meditative practice. Or to put it another way, we are not helping ourselves when we neglect meditation on the grounds that, at the moment, we don't feel we "need it". That approach doesn't work because then when we do need it we won't have the backlog of practice that will enable meditation to do us any good. This point is made on the Interlude website in an article called, "Finding the Still Place":

Gaining access to the still place can seem like finding the way through a maze in the dark. To find it quickly, when we need it, we must become familiar with the way ahead of time. If we had to find a dark place in a maze quickly, we would want to practice going there over and over, until it became second nature. It is the same with finding our quiet mind. We need to go there repeatedly so that we know the way and it becomes easier to make the trip when we might need to.

Practice your meditation when you don't need it. Then when you do need it, it will be accessible to you.