Radiance and Risk

I was eating lunch with my son at an upscale supermarket salad bar when my phone suddenly started to complain. Typically for me, I didn’t know where the phone was so it took me a minute to locate the source of the screeching. By the time I did, it was no longer willing to tell me what its problem was. It shut me down, as if to say, “If you don’t why I’m ranting, clearly there’s no hope for you.” My first thought was not that there was an emergency. My first thought was that it was embarrassing to be disrupting everybody else’s lunch. It did not occur to me until hours later when I taught myself how to retrieve woefully outdated emergency notifications that I might need to know what that sound means. This being Minnesota, it was a test of the tornado drill system. If it had been a real tornado, odds are I’d still be trying to find my phone.

After lunch, I watched my son back out of the condo parking lot and took the elevator to the second floor, all the while feeling guilty that I wasn’t climbing the stairs. Exercise good. Indolence bad. I wasn’t in the apartment two minutes when the fire alarm in the building went off. This system not only screams, it also says “fire, fire” over and over again in case you’re not getting the message. I grabbed my keys and ran downstairs where an oddball assortment of people from the building, equal parts older women and young folks, had assembled. Since it was a Thursday afternoon, I reasoned that the young people could be part of the gig economy, freelancers scraping by who might find sirens and low-level hysteria a welcome distraction from worrying about their cash flow. Once we all saw the fire engines arriving and were able to let go of our anxiety for the moment, the parking lot party really got into high gear. Several of us are in the book group and started exchanging views on the Louise Erdrich novel we’re reading.

Photo by DDP on Unsplash

I’m reminded of the regular military-style fire drills in elementary school when we were lined up to exit the building in size-place order. Each of us knew her place and never forgot it. I was fourth on the girls’ line. This gave me the advantage of being close to the front if an actual fire consumed the old rattrap before we all made it out on to West End Avenue. I also lived two blocks from the school which meant I could go home in the event of a nuclear attack. I was one lucky girl. I don’t remember ever feeling that I was in real danger. Most children didn’t know about that back in the day, before terror alerts, before active shooter drills. The Russians were far away. Guns were at the O.K. Corral. Now, in my enhanced vulnerability as an older person, especially since two recent falls, everything seems to be designed to alert me to possible peril. My surroundings have become one giant warning label, one extended siren. PAY ATTENTION.

The thing is those two words, Pay Attention, are value free. They don’t tell you what to pay attention to. So while you’re busy maintaining vigilance against the possibility of unsecured throw rugs and cracks in the pavement, you’re missing the first daffodils and robins braving the April chill. And while you’re reaching for your Smith and Wesson because you’ve been paying attention to possible wrongdoing in your driveway, you’re missing the innocent young person who got lost and will now never be found.

We all need to be mindful of threats to our safety and what we’re consuming, but we also need to pay attention to the balance of our soul chemistry, our thinking and speech. I need to calibrate my fear level so that equanimity is more than a fancy word, so that there’s time and space for soft things, for beautiful things. I need to pay attention to the people I love and my own heart stirrings. Between being overwhelmed by a paralyzing anxiety and becoming a victim of denial, there has to be a middle ground where I can keep my eyes open and assess the situation for its radiance as well as its risk.

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Copies of my 2019 essay collection, Twilight Time: Aging in Amazement, are available directly from me (signed) or from Amazon or your local bookseller.