Situational Awareness

A few weeks after I returned from a week performing in Switzerland with my guitarist friend Teddy Barlocher, I received terrible news. Bicycling in the mountains near Berne, Teddy had come across a horrific accident. He stopped to help, and, in the confusion, lost his situational awareness and was struck and killed by a passing car.

The tale baked a lesson into me: when things go wrong, I go the other way. Like learning to steer into skids, I've conditioned myself to anti-panic. I pay attention and get hyper-rational. I swiftly process (reframe!) the surprising circumstance, and calmly widen my perceptions to register conditions. At such junctures, the hallway of my apartment or some park bench become like railroad crossings. Even without hair-raising horn blasts from passing locomotives, I won't scamper across tracks without having paid cautious attention.

Everyone knows accidents come in threes, and it's because the first surprise stuns us, making us susceptible to the second surprise, and, just when the horror and the irony register, along comes surprise number three. I'm vigilant to this. While I can't bring back Teddy, I have learned from his mistake.

So when everyone starts freaking and flocking, I remain grounded. "Stop, look, and listen." And as a result, I notice things. Sometimes much broader things. Things other people miss.

In NYC on 9/11, as I knuckled down and plotted my course, I was able to contextualize from within the moment. I realized that history would fail to capture the truth. We'd remember buildings falling, but that was just the nucleus. Ten million people were in deep trauma not just from the event, but from the enormous and insidious uncertainty, which history wouldn't record. The event would be remembered as a tale of buildings collapsing, a tragedy dwarfed by cumulative weeks, months, and even years of subsequent uncertainty for multitudes. Just because nothing else happened didn't mean nothing else happened.

For months afterwards, I ventured into Manhattan with transistor radio and (small) flashlight. I did this because Teddy had died from lack of situational awareness, and because of the uncertainty.

But the same situational awareness reinforces my gratitude that the other shoe never dropped. I never stopped noticing this, or celebrating this, while noting that I was right about history: on September 11, buildings collapsed and everyone was sad, the end.

Yesterday I woke up and turned on my lamp. Nothing. My apartment sometimes flips its circuit breaker, but, no, it checked ok. I opened my door, and the hallway light was out. So it was the whole building. I threw on slippers and walked outside, and the corner grocery was dark. I shuffled around the city, which was, yikes, entirely dark. Passing policemen gravely shrugged off my questions. No idea.

Word filtered down that a big chunk of Europe was dark. This wasn't a problem for my apartment, my building, my block, my town, or my country, but for my entire continent. That's very science-fictiony. A "fresh feeling", as the feminine hygiene ads phrase it.

It seemed most likely that it was a hack of the electric grid, which pointed to Russia (North Korea had no motive and China's too invested in markets to grind them to a halt). Perhaps they had information that the EU was about to radically upscale Ukraine aid. Who knows. But Putin's name was being spit in the streets.

Strolling around town, formulating my plan, I watched panic form in real time. I scored some of the last bottled water in town (the Bangladeshi grocery had declined to gouge the pricing, so I'll stay loyal to them forever) and somehow hustled the case home with damaged arthritic shoulders (it's amazing what you can achieve with ample rest stops and patience).

Everyone was waking up to the realization that they had no more than 24-48 hours' worth of food, and supermarkets were closed, and our water system is fragile. The municipal water treatment was surely offline, and even if we were lucky enough for murky water service to continue, we couldn't boil it, because most have electric stoves.

I asked my building manager if the little girl downstairs would be ok, and whether I should pitch in my extra milk. He reassured me in that empty, baseless, stubborn Portuguese way. It occurred to me to warn him about the water issue, which no one else was considering (thanks, Teddy!). If he has a gas stove, he ought to boil his water before drinking. But he pretended not to understand.

Later I realized he did not want to confess that he did, in fact, have a gas stove, because it might have led to requests for food-sharing. This is a twinkly, smiley, pleasant gentleman with solid eye contact and gentle manner. The nicest of nice guys (for more on nice guys, read this).

Desperate for news, I drove around seeking mobile internet, on the theory that perhaps the 'net wasn't down, but merely over-accessed. But even in the boonies, there was nothing.

Like most, I went to bed at 8:30pm. Hoping to read myself to sleep, I promptly dropped and broke my only flashlight. And my sleep was disturbed by the prospect of a dodgy food supply on my already problematic stomach. But I took solace in recognizing that 24 years untouched by terrorism was an awfully generous run, all considered.

Then the lights suddenly came back on. And I knew it would be tough to make anyone understand that it wasn't just the lights going out. History records the events, not the uncertainty.

Looking back, a lot of this represented the sort of self-story-telling I constantly warn against. I was conjuring froth, then suffering from conjured froth. After all, I didn't know it was terrorism, or Putin. And I didn't need to link it to 9/11 and make it a part of some tragic larger story. While I was likely the calmest person in town, I have to concede that I fluttered.

But the thing about this world, with all its touchy drama, is that everyone gets caught sometimes. There are moments when traumas line up and even a highly equanimous yogi is punked by the passing yadda-yadda. What matters—all that really matters—is how quickly we recover perspective. It doesn't require the lights returning. Just the recognition that bumpy rides are, indeed, rides, and we paid to ride this rollercoaster.

Even with power coming back, it can be hard to restore equanimity. Our facility for post-suffering exceeds even our tremendous pre-suffering.

Postscript: Don't just grab the most inviting string—"9/11 was bad" or "What would I do in a blackout" or "Don't imagine you can rely on the nice guy". There's more to consider. Even when you're placing yourself in such circumstances hypothetically, you'd honor Teddy by aiming for the broadest situational awareness.