The guy on the phone sounded hyped up and anxious, which probably isn’t the ideal system state for a dispatch person. He was calling to get some information from me, to pass on to Emergency Services, because my partner had launched an SOS call from his device somewhere in the backcountry. He didn’t have any other information for me. And I didn’t know my husband’s licence plate, or who he was out with, where they’d gone, or where they were headed. (I know, I know, but sometimes my beloved-of-the-past-ten-thousand-days sounds a bit like white noise, sometimes I just don’t ask, and sometimes his plans unfold at the last minute and I’ve already left for my day.)
I had a flash of cold clarity: is this the phone call that changes the rest of my life? I was grateful our 12-year-old was at school and I’d have a few hours to work out what the situation was before needing to tend to him as well. I started making calls.
Twenty minutes later, I had a page of scribbled notes and numbers and an inner emergency circle activating, when three messages came in via every channel my husband had at his disposal: Stand down, false alarm. All is well. I called everyone with the update. The RCMP wouldn’t fully accept it until they’d driven to our house to physically sight him that night, but every other emergency response immediately stood down, except my own nervous system’s, which doesn’t have such an easy-to-access off-switch.
My yoga mat was unfolded next to the kitchen table. I took myself to the ground, assumed “child’s pose,” knees wide, sitting back on my haunches, bowing forward, forehead to the ground, letting the earth reassure me: All’s well. All’s well. All’s well.
For now.
It’s a temporary reprieve. I know this. One day, there will come the call that changes everything launching us into an entirely new narrative arc. But for now, I could go back to my plot line and eat the lunch that had grown cold sitting by the stove-top.
That night, freshly sighted in the driveway by a police officer, and in debt a case of beer to friends for hijacking their mellow morning with a false alarm, my apologetic fella mentioned a podcast he’d listened to for work. In Delivering Adventure, Whistlerite Chris Kaipio interviews ice-climber and paraglider Will Gadd about managing risk in our high-risk sports. Gadd takes issue with the word “manage.” Instead, he “engages” with risk.
I turn over the difference between managing something and engaging with it, in my mind. I never liked being managed by an employer, or worse, a middle manager who was trying to download his responsibilities on to me so he could go skiing. I don’t like when someone tries to manage my emotions, when it would feel more respectful to engage with them. I parent in a way that is an awkward tussle between the sense that I should be managing my kid, his schedule, his ambitions, my ambitions for him, his emotions, his social life, and his future possibilities much more professionally, but the effort and joy of engaging with those things is more natural, even though it seems to put him in the driver’s seat a lot more than I ever was allowed to be in it as a kid…
I’ve attended community engagement sessions and felt horribly “managed” by the process, as if I was just part of a check-a-box routine and the procedure was held very tightly so nothing could go off script or get too unwieldy. I left feeling suffocated, patronized, disengaged.
It’s interesting, that we use the phrase “to get engaged” when a couple decides to make a commitment to each other and embark on a life together. We don’t pledge “mutual management.” It’s a promise to dance, to navigate the mess.
Indeed, engagement feels preferable all around. So much more respectful. Less clean and clear. More unwieldy and dynamic. But definitely preferable.
Lately, I’m listening to the grief teacher Francis Weller in conversation with Nate Hagens on the Great Simplification podcast. All around me, people are walking their own grief journeys, Trump seems to signal imminent collapse with his every rambling pronouncement, AI is becoming more and more frightening, and my nervous system doesn’t know what to make of it all.
Weller, the author of The Wild Edge of Sorrow, says the thing about grief is, we need to engage with it, but more often than not, we try and manage it, and our management technique is usually to just stuff it down hard. Try not to let it out. Most people are afraid of their grief, their big feelings, afraid that if they give in to them, there’s no coming back. But really, says Weller, what happens is that by oppressing those emotions, we become stuck, frozen, reduced versions of ourselves.
He says, once, we lived in communities with lives that met “the primary satisfactions”—we were nourished by ritual, shared meals, conversation, dance, singing… and in the loss of these from our cultures and ways of being, we crave something and meet it with secondary satisfactions—money, stuff, success, accolades, stimuli, things to make us feel fulfilled and alive… but because they aren’t primary satisfactions, the gaping hole at our heart for connecting and belonging, will never be filled, so we keep on consuming consuming more more more. We have become unsatisfiable, and insatiable, trying hard not to feel anything unpleasant or bad, and thereby not really feeling very alive at all.
As I write this (and may the fickle hand of fate pass over me for a bit longer, and may waves of grace and love be with those who are in the grip of that hairy hand), I am the person whose partner came home, whose kid is walking up the driveway at the end of the day, and who has a clean bill of health. I don’t presume any of those things, any more. Weller calls this the first gate of grief: everything we love we will lose. Precarity is actually the bass track for our entire life playlist. Sometimes a false alarm is a beautiful wake-up call. Sometimes the alarm is real and we are in the storm, or watching from the sidelines as someone else has their life rocked.
Engaging with the precarity of my life and loves, right now, won’t fully prepare me for the one-day loss of them, but it has awakened me to their preciousness a little more.
At the very least, I’ll make the effort to ask the fella where he plans to go tomorrow.
Lisa Richardson is a longtime contributor to Pique whose writing, journalling workshops, yoga classes and other random contributions are fuelled by her deep gratitude for place and desire to contribute to greater community resilience.
