Feeling
Secure
“Be
patient with all that is unsolved in your heart, and try to love the
questions themselves. Do not seek answers, which cannot be given to
you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to
live everything. Live the questions.”
Rainer
Maria Rilke
“Security
is mostly superstition. It does not exist in nature nor do the
children of men as a whole experience it. Avoiding danger is no safer
in the long run than outright exposure. Life is either a daring
adventure, or nothing.”
Helen
Keller
These two quotes are
probably my all-time favorites; the ones I come back to over and
over. During my childhood, at the beginning of the cold war, we went
through drills at school in which loud horns blew, and we leapt under
our desks, or squatted in the hallway with our arms over our heads—as
though our small desks, and our bare arms would somehow protect us
from bombs. There were fire drills every single month in which the
school bell rang in a staccato rhythm, and we lined up and filed out
to the back of the playground, fast but orderly. In those days, we
expected danger to come from the sky, or from within the building
itself. Never did it occur to us that someone might walk in with guns
and start shooting children. No one in the school had a gun, even
though our area of the mountains was loaded with “potential black
bears.” Different time, different fears.
The truth is, and has
always been, that security is mostly an illusion. Life, when we were
Paleolithic cave people, when we were nomadic tribes, and right now,
is a cosmic toss of the dice. We humans are naked little animals with
not much to protect us, but hope and faith. If we don't have those,
we're in pretty scary circumstances. But, we do have them. We have
this indomitable spirit that dares to feel potent, that dares to face
hardship, to struggle and resist tyranny, and, if we have to, to band
together and march in the streets until something changes. We have
this incredible determination to make life better for all of us, even
though it flies in the face of thousands of years of history. We push
forward, one inch at a time.
I love that about us. It
makes me feel secure. It takes away the dark-of-the-night trepidation
that something terrible is about to happen. Something terrible may
happen, but we're up to the task. We keep right on asking the
questions. We keep trying to live the answers, and we do what we can
to bring about peace—which is the only true route to security.
In the Spirit,
Jane
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