In these sometimes scary times, in this pandemic, one thing we are hearing so much about is staying safe… safe distances from each other; safe practices for washing and handling anything and everything that we come in contact with; staying home- which is presumed to be a safe place to be; and staying healthy- which presupposes safety- how can we be healthy if we are not safe?
This morning I heard someone, a respected mentor and colleague of mine, ask her community to keep each other safe but in another way. It was an online invitation, as everything is now, but it got me reflecting on “Keeping Safe”…
I’ve been considering how we stay safe when we are not with each other… this is because we actually rely on certain real connections with one another to have safety within ourselves. We each need a secure (safe) caregiver to grow into a feeling of safety, and then to be able to trust ourselves in the between spaces, when loneliness can grow. We can each learn not to berate punish or judge ourselves, and not to starving ourselves of love. We can grow into a safe relationship with ourselves when we experience a safe and strong love from another.
Different but related to this, I’ve noticed how even though we are being told to stay safe, we are simultaneously being convinced daily or hourly (by multiple sources of varying credibility) that we are not really safe at all, and can’t be, and thus we stay afraid, or grow more fearful- thinking, “certainly we are not safe and maybe we never will be”, and thus we often try more frantically to protect ourselves. Personal safety IS a slippery slope. We can slide down it into the possessed frenzy of compulsive security seeking. I think it’s when we lean toward keeping each other safe that much more becomes possible.
I love how when I ask “how I can keep you safe?”, I am still keeping myself safe, but I am also already expanding the definition and power of safety… What do we need to feel safe? Well, different things for different people, but we all need do need to know someone is thinking about us, caring about us, and wanting to know how we are doing. In this time of physical distance we can still embody these gestures of love in our reaching out… I find myself thinking of letter writing before the digital age, how close we could feel to another through holding the tactile page in our hands, running over them with our fingertips, such comfort even though the sender was likely very far away.
The reality now, too, is that some of us are not at all “safe at home”. Whether it be the deep vulnerability we feel to our own shadows or demons, or the deepening dread of painful conflict with those who share our homes or buildings with us, or the real horror of being trapped at home with an abusive partner or parent, we each need to know that we are not alone. To see or hear from someone outside of our small self, someone who has shown us they care, IS an unimaginable support and reminder of a web of connection that is much stronger than any one of us.
And this then takes us out into the bigger wider meaning of safety… because we can’t know what this all will hold for us, or what it will mean for our communities… because there are so many trying to predict or give their best guesses and this still doesn’t quell our worried minds, …and because right now there are already poor, marginalized, and vulnerable people whose safety was a fiction or a fantasy in our deeply unequal world before any of this began… because we know that this time brings more fear, more suffering and hardship, and more insecurity as the economic reality gets real for these forgotten ones.
So this is the time, the time when we keep each other safe, when we show up for each other’s well being, financial, spiritual, biological, emotional, and in so doing WE are safe, not you or me, but WE. Because all along being SAFE has always really been about creating it with each other, and this virus is just reminding us of that… May I help to keep you safe, and may you do the same for your friends and strangers…