Should I stay or should I go?

 

With the news covered with bombs dropping and disastrous weather and wild fires and floods, what is one to do?

We all want to have a place called home. A place that we can store our stuff and come back to with a key that only we has to open the door. Hopefully we choose a place where the neighbors are nice and the local market has a variety of chips and cereal and the roads are smooth and you feel safe to sleep there.

Then some sort of unsettling occurrence happens shaking our normality. Whether it is a war or a tornado or a forest fire or an earthquake, your world becomes insufferable. What will you do?

If there is a premonition or forecast for a climate change, you can pack up the car and drive away from the impending doom. If not, best advices is hunker down into a shallow space and check your rosary.

When the dust settles, do you stay or do you go?

If it is an invasion, do you pack your favorite items and drive off into the unknown leaving all your precious accumulations and landscaping? When you return what will you find? Do you return?

It is certainly understandable to get out of the way, but where do you go? Is there family or friends a few miles away that would gratefully provide you refuge? How long will that last?

What if there isn’t any known place to go?

Stop in a hotel? Costly accommodations with room service may not be a long-term answer for shelter.

If what you have on your back with no transportation and no direction, what is your decision? This is where those good people come in. Folks who are complete strangers who will welcome you into their home, feed you, find safe resting spots even in a language you do not understand and offer a smile. What makes some people empathize to the point where your discomfort becomes their obsession? That is a discussion for another time.

What about tomorrow?

  If you can’t run, do you shelter in place? Do you fight to keep your processions or go down with the ship?

We, as a species, seem to migrate. We travel for work, we travel for love, we travel for education and we travel for entertainment. If we travel, we hope to come back home and find everything in its place and hope you didn’t leave the stove on. If we migrate, we may not have plans to go back and will settle in somewhere else. We will become your neighbors or be placed next to a smelly industrial area to know our place in society.

Moving is one of the most stressful actions we voluntarily take. Though nothing more than boxing up all your ‘stuff’, loading it all in a truck, driving to another location, unloading all your boxes, then spending months trying to find things is moving.