Something Is Not Okay: a fire on our street

If you walked down our street today, you would have no idea about the fire last Monday. Unless someone pointed it out, you probably wouldn't even notice the patch of burned up grass in the alley. Which is incredible, because for a few minutes Monday afternoon, it felt entirely possible that everything might not be the same again.

It was late afternoon, and I was at home on the laptop when something started to feel off. Initially, there wasn't anything obvious to describe. I felt this strange pulse in my body, almost a vrrrm, vrrrm, vrrrm. Then it became almost auditory, like I could hear it as much as feel it.

Whatever it was, it felt wrong- in my guts it felt wrong.

I stopped what I was doing and went outside. The second I did, the sensation got louder and more intense. I had no idea what was happening. My brain briefly went somewhere enormous: Is a bomb dropping? My body was registering something BIG before my rational brain had any information to attach to it.

I walked into the yard and yelled the words, “Something is not okay!”

You’d never know there was a fire on Monday.

All that’s left to see is this strip of burned up grass in the alley.

Which I thought was fairly dramatic, until my yard filled with white smoke. Something was definitely not okay. I called 911.

The smoke was coming from next door. I couldn't tell whether the fire was inside or outside- and were Alex and Blakely home and inside the house still?

There wasn't a lot of rational thought happening at this point. There didn't need to be. People needed to know. People needed to get out of their houses. So I became the extremely loud, extremely committed neighborhood alarm system. I was hoarse afterward.

Then our whole street came alive.

I ran across the street and started pounding on Jon and Emma's door. Jimmy came over. Adam came over. At some point a big white SUV rolled up and just started laying on the horn, apparently trying to alert anybody and everybody within earshot.

Some random person appeared out of nowhere and started dragging a sprinkler toward the front yard. To be clear, there was a live power line down. A sprinkler was perhaps not our finest collective idea.

But that's also what I loved about watching the whole thing unfold. Everybody was trying to help with whatever they had. Some of it was useful. Some of it was probably dangerous. Some of it was just a person in a giant white SUV laying on their horn like their moment had finally arrived.

Nobody held a meeting or appointed a neighborhood emergency task force. People just activated. Eventually the actual professionals arrived, thank God, because the neighborhood had contributed about all the expertise it reasonably should. The fire department was there within about two minutes of my 911 call and immediately took over.

Oncor said old copper wires were to blame, setting a blaze that scared the bejeezus out of our street, knocking out power to 2,000+ residents.

Eventually we pieced together what had happened. A major city power line had come down and the grass next door had caught fire. There were two explosions and roughly 2,000 people in the surrounding area lost power.

Somehow, everyone and all our homes were okay. I keep coming back to the few seconds before I knew any of that.

I spend my professional life working with the nervous system. I talk a lot about awareness, adaptability, responsiveness and having enough bandwidth to meet what life actually puts in front of us. Monday made those ideas very concrete.

My body registered that something in my environment had changed before I consciously understood what it was. More importantly, I listened to it.

As it turned out, I was the one to initially call 911 and was the first person out in the middle of the street, yelling, knocking on doors and getting everyone around me aware that something was happening.

That detail has stayed with me- not because I think I possessed some magical sixth sense or handled the situation better than anyone else. Clearly, within minutes, the whole damn street was involved. What interests me is that there was a stretch of time when my body had registered information my conscious mind hadn't caught up with yet.

I didn't know what was wrong. I just trusted myself enough to respond when something felt wrong. And in this case, seconds mattered.

The goal isn't to walk through life hypervigilant, scanning for danger. It's almost the opposite. It's having enough awareness of ourselves and our environment that when something genuinely changes, we can notice the signal among all the noise.

I didn't second guess what I knew just because I couldn't explain it yet.

That experience also made me think about how easily we confuse nervous-system regulation with calmness. We picture a regulated person as serene and unflappable, maybe breathing deeply while everyone else loses their shit.

But sometimes losing your shit is exactly the right response.

If there's a live power line in your neighbor's yard and things are exploding, I don't particularly want a nervous system that gazes peacefully at the situation and maintains its resting heart rate. I want one that notices the threat and mobilizes.

Sometimes your heart should pound. Sometimes you should run. Sometimes you should yell.

Regulation isn't perpetual calm. It's responsiveness.

Monday gave me an unexpected lesson in that, too.

After the firefighters arrived, several of us ended up in my neighbor's living room. People were cracking jokes and behaving remarkably normally, all things considered.

Meanwhile, I was unmistakably freaking the fuck out. I looked around the room and said, “I am a somatic practitioner, and I am absolutely the person in this room who is unhinged. ”

One of my neighbors laughed. “Every person in this room is completely freaking out. You're just the person who's able to express it.”

Ohhhhhhh. Right.

I wasn't the dysregulated person in a room full of beautifully regulated people. I was scared because something awful had just happened, and I wasn't hiding it.

Sometimes losing your shit is exactly the right response.

Sometimes your heart should pound.

Sometimes you should run.

Sometimes you should yell.

My body had mobilized for an emergency. The emergency was ending and I was having a completely honest response to what had just happened. It felt terrifying, and I was allowed to act like it did.

Regulation isn't performing calmness. There's something important about being able to experience what we're actually experiencing without immediately masking it or making ourselves more palatable. There's congruence in allowing the outside and inside to match.

Maybe that's a better definition of regulation than “nothing rattles me.”

Life can rattle the absolute hell out of me. I just want enough capacity to stay present and move with it.

And then there was the other thing Monday showed me. For a few minutes, I genuinely didn't know if my neighbors were alive.They had gone inside to get their cats. Something exploded. Someone screamed the kind of scream you do not want to hear coming from the direction of a burning house.

I didn't know whether the fire would spread, what would happen to my own house, whether we were about to lose everything. And I discovered, with so much clarity:

I give zero fucks about my house or any of my stuff.

My house could burn down. The things I've collected and organized and maintained and insured and occasionally convinced myself are very important could all disappear. If my family, my neighbors and my animals were standing safely beside me, I could walk away.

I don't say that cavalierly. Losing a home can be devastating. But in that particular moment, when the possibility suddenly wasn't theoretical, there was no internal debate about what mattered more.

People. Family. Love. Connection. Community.

Underneath all the adrenaline, I felt this enormous presence of love, and something I can only describe as connection to Source. All the normal stuff we spend our days worrying about got very small, very fast. It was one of those moments of reckoning that life occasionally hands you without asking permission:

Here. Let me show you what you actually care about. Message received.

Within the hour, the fire was out. Everyone was safe. The cats came home. Eventually the electricity came back on. Our street returned to normal. And now there's almost nothing to see.

Life is meant to be experinced. All of it. From fire to donuts.

Love your people, know your neighbors.

Listen to your body.

Saturday morning, a text came through from Alex and Blakely. They were feeling grateful for everyone after Monday, and there were donuts from The Salty sitting on their porch for the neighbors.

Help yourself. I laughed when I read it because it felt like the perfect epilogue.

Monday felt like pending disaster.

On Saturday there were donuts on the porch.

Maybe that's what remains after something like this. Not the evidence of the emergency itself, there's remarkably little of that left, but the knowledge of what happened between people when it mattered.

I know what I care about. Our mortality really is almost as fragile as the flip of a coin. We get very good at forgetting that because, frankly, we'd never get the laundry done otherwise. But every once in a while life pulls the curtain back.

So love your people. Know your neighbors. Listen to your body when it tells you something isn't right. Don't be afraid to make a scene when a scene is called for. Let yourself have the bejeezus scared out of you when something is genuinely terrifying.

And afterward? Put some donuts on the porch. There are worse philosophies for a life.