In the summer of 1979 a frenzy swept across the world. A giant hunk of metal known as Skylab would slip the bounds of its orbit, fall to the earth, break up, and scatter across the planet. Experts mused that even a small chunk falling into a critical bit of municipal or national infrastructure could prove devastating and, of course, an individual would be killed if struck by a fragment.
People built shelters, and others moved to areas they suspected were less likely to be within the debris field. The big challenge, though, was that nobody knew with any degree of certainty where these bits of man-made devastation would land. It created what literally became an existential crisis for anyone who thought about it, even for a moment.
There was a moment, sometime prior to its actual landfall, when I had a bit of an epiphany. I realized that safety was illusory. Human beings, as individuals and as groups, have never been, are not, nor will ever be safe. Safety, or the idea of safety, is something we use to lower our stress hormones, and it certainly is useful in that regard but, as for accurately depicting the dynamic and ever-changing status of our personal well being in relation to being affected by outside influence, it is a very poor tool.
We can cite many an example where people who felt perfectly safe discovered, tragically, that they were wrong. Frozen blocks of human waste ejected from a jet at 30,000 feet makes a rude awakening when it falls through the roof of one’s house. Victims of assault, robbery, rape, and other violent crimes probably felt safe before their attacks, and less so after. The passengers of the planes that departed New York on the morning of September 11th, 2001, were relaxed, enjoying a sip of coffee, and perhaps wondering what the in-flight movie was going to be. Office workers in the Twin Towers probably expected another ‘day at the office.’
After those tragic attacks, we had a choice about how to move forward. We could face the cold hard truth that each moment is vitally precious because it could be our last, or turn away in search of a misguided and false sense of safety. Sadly, we did the latter. Today, we are no safer than we were 11 years ago on September 10th, nor any safer than the 21st of July, 1979, when the world learned that the entirety of Skylab fell onto an unoccupied area of Western Australia.
We are no more or less safe than the people who went to see Batman in Colorado, or than those sweet little kids who went to school this morning in Sandy Hook, but never came home. We’re all just as safe as my friend who, last December, went for a morning drive in Florida, or his friend who took off on a small airplane in March of last year for a trip to Utah.
If safety is, in fact, delusional than what is it that we can do to face life without crumbling into trembling, ineffectual blobs? Without safety, we can become aware that, every day, we’re taking heroic actions. Every day that we get up and face the world, we are being courageous. Every day, we’re risk takers whose actions aren’t driven by delusion, but by a vision that each moment of life is precious, and worth experiencing to the fullest extent.
Whether we’re sweeping up, washing dishes, creating a spread sheet, or singing a song, that timidity we’ve clung to need not prevent us from stepping forward. Great things are possible when we abandon the delusion of safety. What will you do?