And then, like someone rang ole buzzkill Pete’s dinner bell, my brain tried to ruin it.
“Red sky in the morning, sailors take warning” is the old rhyme. If you were never a pirate in the 1600s or my uncle Kilgore ( a fish bit off half his finger ), you may have never heard that, but it’s like this: If the sunrise is red, you’d better be prepared for some rough weather.
A little geography: when I’m standing on my back porch, I’m roughly 400 miles from the nearest ocean.
Still, I began to think of shipwrecks, and screaming sailors being thrown off a ship into the sea. Why. Why do I do this.
That part of me that scans the horizon for threats wants to turn every quiet second into a briefing, or a preparation.
I get why. We’re wired to pay attention. We’re wired to notice danger.
The problem is that “the environment” used to mean the woods and the weather and the people in your immediate circle. If the sky is red in the morning, yeah, take warning.
But now the immediate environment is the whole world.
We carry the entire planet in our pockets, and I do not think the deep animal part of the brain can tell the difference between “ALERT: a wolf is nearby” and “ALERT: a wolf attacked someone in Alaska last week.” So it’s just fight-or-flight. All day.
And I don’t know about you, but panic doesn’t turn me into a better person or a more helpful citizen. It turns me into a clenched fist holding a burrito and the burrito is all dropping beans on the floor. Know what I’m saying? Burrito?
Sometimes people get mad at me because I’m not performing the correct level of outrage at the news of the world and instead I’m making ridiculous burrito jokes. They hear any kind of “things are going to be okay” energy and take it as an insult.
