The Door to Your Heart

"Let gentleness my strong enforcement be." ~ William Shakespeare, from As You Like It

I put a frozen cinnamon raisin bagel in the toaster, clipped Chupie's leash to her collar, and headed outside before getting my workday started. It had been a busy morning already – slept past the alarm after a 25-hour fast for Yom Kippur, had a cup of coffee while I journaled and did Wordle, then drove to Springfield about half hour from here for my twice-yearly full skin check. After the all clear (THANK G-D), I stopped to do a couple of errands.

By the time I got home, I was quite hungry, and glad for the H&H bagels in ziploc bags in the freezer. It crossed my mind briefly, is this fine to leave the house with the toaster on? I decided since no cheese was involved, it would be safe. Chalupa peed, I grabbed yesterday's mail, and was ready to come back inside. Chupie had other ideas, though, so we dawdled around the dirt edges of the road while I waited to see if she had to poop.

My sense of time suddenly kicked back in, and a wave of fear rushed through me. What if the house was on fire? I'd had a scary fire experience last summer in our old apartment – a completely careless moment of placing an oven mitt on a burner I hadn't realized was on – and even before that, fear of fire has for some reason been something I've carried despite never having experienced such a terror in this lifetime.

At this point, Chupie was living up to the accurate "stubborn as a bulldog" saying, and as I walked up the driveway and the house came into view, I saw steam rising from the roof. In that instant, my brain translated this steam into smoke and pictured flames filling the kitchen. I dropped the leash and sprinted towards the door. I even yelled "OH MY G-D" out loud as my heart immediately started pounding in response to the surge of adrenaline my limbic system was now pouring into my body.

I paused long enough to realize I couldn't just leave our dog standing there – she is not that kind of pup – and turned back to get her, dropping the mail and kicking off my sandals so as to be able to run. Socks soaking wet from rain, I flew through the front door, knowing almost immediately that everything was fine. My bagel, though the slightest bit burnt from having toasted so long, was just sitting there sadly in the now-cold appliance. The steam rolling off the roof in the sun was just that – steam.

With Chalupa looking confused and possibly bewildered by my extreme behavior, I went back outside to retrieve shoes and mail from the asphalt, glad no one was around to see me. As I walked back towards the door, a wave of compassion overcame me. Compassion for the fears I still carry, some of them irrational and not rooted in any kind of reality, others justified given the world we live in, and especially the ways in which these can still at times overtake me, knocking me over with the force of their convictions.

To learn to stay calm in the face of a possible emergency and certainly in the presence of a real one is the work of a lifetime. Some of us experience this more acutely than others in the ins and outs of our daily work – emergency responders, to be certain, and also teachers, social workers, physicians and nurses, therapists, firefighters. Those folks (one hopes and imagines) develop their capacity to respond calmly in the face of danger (though we all know that there are terrible exceptions to this hope and imagining, too).

For others of us – and here I include myself – daily life is actually quite quiet and calm externally, and these fears tend to exist covertly and existentially in an unseen interior landscape that only occasionally flashes forth in the physical world, as just happened for me. Maybe it was a delayed release of the fears I don’t spend much time acknowledging of a melanoma recurrence, or the fact that my son is currently off-grid in Utah for two weeks and I am relying on the old “no news is good news” adage until he’s back in contact eight days from now, just to name a couple.

The house was not, in fact, on fire (THANK G-D). Just as the things I may fear are not, in fact, happening, rendering fear moot. I think of those whose homes have been destroyed by fire and flood, whose babies have died at the hands of police or mass shooters, who live in fear of getting pulled over by ICE. These do not diminish my fears, but they certainly put into perspective the relative safety of a highly privileged existence.

And so, I come away from my not-a-fire experience this morning a wee bit sheepish, though resisting shame. Mostly I feel tenderized and humbled, with a renewed determination to work to direct my response mechanisms to situations that actually warrant a swift response.

Especially poignant was having this experience the day after Yom Kippur, the culmination of 10 days of intense self-reflection and introspection. My daughter Aviva led the family service (major kvelling here!), and I loved the way she taught the Ashamnu, a prayer of collective confession when we typically touch a fist to our heart with each regret. She said that the point wasn’t to beat ourselves up but to tap – ever so gently – on the heart, as one would on a door. Only then can the door to the heart truly open.

Some of our fears may have been passed down from our ancestors who survived in part because of them. Others are borne of living in a country where violence is so quotidian. And still others skulk around the dark alleys of our subconscious, where our own lived experiences coalesce and color how we move through life.

For whatever fears are lurking and living in our cells today, for the times we overreact, may we bring a spirit of gentleness to ourselves as we continue to see what it is we’re still carrying. Only then might we begin to release them, experience more peace in a perilous world, and get better at discerning true threats from optical illusions, smoke from steam.