You’re not safe.
Aha!
You knew it, right?
This “unsafe” thing is what sends people running to retreats and therapy and doctors and booze and meditation and political rallies and onesies with feet.
Though even with all that, you never have been safe.
No matter how many brownies were eaten or how many friends lined up for a comfort hug.
No matter how long that job, that health, that spouse has been there.
You vote, rally, canvas and protest, and yet don’t control the election outcome.
You dedicate yourself to years of diets, vitamins and exercise and still get ailments, or wrench a knee, or get hit by a bus.
You turn yourself inside out to be what some partner or boss wants, and still they’re dissatisfied and ditch you anyway.
You concoct all kinds of ways of convincing yourself you are or can be safe, and that you and all those carefully chosen actions are what made that happen.
And yet, that sense of something not right, something bad happening or going to happen…
It’s right there…
Just waiting for the brownie pan to be empty.
Man don’t you hate that?
You want safety. You want promises. You want assurances, dammit.
Which, if they come at all, never seem to be adequate anyway.
And yet somehow, despite all that, here you are.
Have you noticed, through all the attempts and strategies to be safe, and all the feelings that insist you’re not…
Here you are, safe?
Funny how that gets missed.
When I was in high school my mom had a friend whose husband went out to the car to get something, while his wife went out to their backyard. When the husband came back to the yard the wife was dead. She had taken a bite of apple from their backyard tree and choked on it.
That should have been a safe scenario, right? Woman in her own backyard?
‘Course, she actually was safe. She was outta here.
And her husband was OK, though he didn't look it by most standards. He felt some very intense stuff for a while, went through a storm, and went on to live his life.
So somehow we are simultaneously not safe - things can change at any moment...
And at the same time, regardless of how it seems or feels, we are also...
Safe.
Until we’re not.
And even then, we are.
Got that?
From the moment we're born, we walk through life inherently insecure.
We never know what’s going to happen next.
We like to think we do, and we try, try, try to make a place where any uncertainty doesn’t have to be acknowledged.
But those strategies don’t work. We feel the falseness in them.
Which is why so often that underlying sense of anxiety and uncertainty continues to hum away in the background.
Because we want to DO SOMETHING. But we don’t know what. Or how.
At some level, we know we are powerless in this regard.
This contradiction- being always-unsafe while also being always-safe - can drive the mind a little nuts.
It hates complexity, contradiction and non-black-and-white.
But like it or not, the fact remains that we’re still always both- safe and unsafe.
So perhaps instead of trying so hard to eradicate insecurity, we might shift focus and notice the security already here.
Because there’s a lot of it.
Besides, maybe we don’t need to protect against it all anyway.
Maybe we can sink into uncertainty.
See if it’s so gosh-darn terrible.
If only because noticing safety that’s already here, even though there's constant uncertainty, can be a calming experience.
Which, as it happens is what we’re looking for, right?
And really, in the end, what is there to protect?
A Body? Bodies are already protected by existence.
They're protected until existence says it's time to not be.
We can’t outmaneuver existence. When it’s time to go, it’s time.
Nothing we do can protect against that.
Are we protecting an image?
Nah, images don’t need protection.
So maybe there’s nothing to protect. Maybe there’s nothing to do. Maybe it’s not up to us.
Maybe we can relax into the reality of insecurity, uncertainty and not knowing. And just experience the beauty of complexity.
May as well.
Because we've been living this paradoxical safe/unsafe thing all our lives.
We're used to it.
We're safely unsafe.
We're unsafely safe.
Whew.
Finally a certainty we can count on.
