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The Question for Our Times: Will We Be Ok?
It’s the one question that keeps me up at night
When I was a child, I learned to be hypervigilant as a way of feeling I had some control over my safety. I never knew when my parents were going to start fighting, which always resulted in my mother crying and my father slamming doors and yelling. Scary stuff for a small child. Hypervigilance was the learned response to the unpredictability of my childhood home. I was constantly scanning my environment for danger.
I am finding myself back in that place of keeping my head on the swivel, looking for where the next blow is coming from, hoping I will be prepared. Hypervigilance has become my default position again in this unpredictable world, and it is taking its toll both mentally and physically.
Since last fall we have suffered the horrific consequences of Hurricane Helene in our part of Western North Carolina. Then, just last week, we watched more than 20,000 acres burn all around us. Now, we are expecting massive storms to come through this weekend with damaging winds and flooding rains. Did I mention we live in a forest on the side of a mountain with a creek running below the house? We are pretty vulnerable to this kind of weather event.
During the recent fires, friends of ours had to evacuate their house. My friend…
