If you follow my columns weekly in this section of the paper then you’re probably one of us who has lived long enough to understand what is meant by the kind of everyday danger that only you can help yourself get out of. It’s much easier than trying to save the world from inevitable global warming but nonetheless tricky and, in more ways than one, just as fatal. We’re not talking about balance – like walking a tightrope from one point to another. It’s mimicking weightlessness – an impossibility, really – in crossing a stretch of deep, frozen water to get to the other side because after you is a pack of wolves that smell blood and you’re the only living thing in sight. You can only hope that the ice doesn’t crack from under and suck you down into frozen oblivion. It is all about accepting that the danger exists and it can exist for you and happen to you. It is about reading the weather, measuring temperatures and knowing the terrain. It is resisting being beholden to the beauty of what’s on top and forgetting what’s just an inch and beyond below it. It is planning. It is realizing you have no choice but to do it one sure way. Yes, it is all about survival.
The danger situations we face are more recognizable to businessmen with high stakes to save or doctors with life or death surgeries to perform or firemen with trapped victims to rescue. Do or die – even for themselves. The dice are rolled because there is no choice. Unfortunately for most of us, even when looked in the eye by a smiling, dagger-wielding, smooth-talker, we still believe we have a choice. And it is in these miscalculations that we end up stomping on the cracks and we end up ice cubes so fast we don’t know where we fell into. An ordinary thin-ice situation would be about a wife knowing something’s going on with her husband but she keeps quiet as she tries to deconstruct the scenario. Things haven’t been well for a while between them and the husband is bolder in his infidelity. Does she wait on it while suffering with her best possible comportment or does she confront? She knows she has to talk it out and face what he has to say. And she goes for it hoping she gets where she intends to. She still runs the risk of saying something to let him off the hook and leave for good. In a movie I saw the lead was a star drummer in the school band. He was hated because he was a maverick, crossing lines while leading his team to victory after victory in competitions. On the eve of the championships he is lured by his own teammates to go on a drinking spree. He always got away with it in the past. Should he risk his relationship with guys he’d wanted for so long to be on his side or risk the competition? What about personal finances? Oh, yes, the stark reality many of us try hard to avoid thinking we can always try to earn more and earn back for the next 100 years more. The danger signs are there – credit cards always maxed out, educational loans used for a new car, a new car that’s defaulted in amortization for the past three months, talking about retirement plans and changing the subject, "That’s too far in the future." Thin ice.
Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, "In skating over thin ice our safety is in our speed." I’ve dealt with my own thin-ice moments. You must consider the profession I chose, the means of living I find and the lifestyle I lead – there have indeed been many of those situations. In my juvenile optimism, my misplaced trust, in my haste I’ve failed to see the signs. I’ve stomped on the cracks and fallen in. I’ve been frozen and then thawed over and over. It is true that as you get older the more you are afraid. Because you realize what’s out there. But you can’t be stumped by fear. As imperiled as you might many times feel – that in itself is a good start in acknowledging the danger. And from there strategizing your survival plan is the rest of the sentence. For sure it was always in reading the temperature, acclimatizing, knowing the terrain and not being beholden to the beauty of what was on the surface that prepared me the next time. Hopefully, no more trails that lead me to more thin-ice obstacle courses. Sometimes blindsided, there were mazes that still saw me hounded by a pack of wolves facing a frozen lake. I’ve had to cross and there was always the danger, still, of falling in. But my batting average has since seen me dry and victorious after the course on the other side. And it was indeed in the speed of crossing what I had to that got me where I should.
From the top of the highest mountains in the world the author Mark Bowen believes there is still hope. He is frantically hurrying up everyone to see what he sees. He is almost desperate getting people to stop burning fossil fuel and heating up the earth even more – and the time to do it is now. Otherwise, the world will have to learn and apply in another lifetime – when the grim effects of global warming do come to pass. Luckily, we have this lifetime to keep learning from for our next personal situation. There are no answers provided – only that a decision has to be made to cross and cross now. And it is in the speed of our determined learning that we will survive.
Oh, I forgot one important component to your survival mechanism – getting over the fear or, at least, facing it.