You have to know your place.
Nah, this post is SO not about telling you to behave; it seems to me when people say “Know your place” in that sense they’re always certain your place is below them, and I’m more of an equality kind of person.
I’m talking about knowing your physical places, where you spend your time now and where you might be spending your time if something bad goes down (such as a bug-out location).
Know your place – what sights and sounds are natural and normal?
This photo I just saw up on Salty’s screen reminded me of the first time I heard a deer call for her fawn.
I’d seen about a zillion deer (our county has more deer than people), but I’d never lived right in among them to hear them calling. It was eye-opening, a loud sort of huffing coming from the dark woods, clearly Some big animal?!? (There may have been mental images from various thriller movies involved in my response.)
Then there was the night the raccoons decided to procreate on my front porch when I was at The Place by myself.
The good news: I can find Mr. Glock in three seconds flat awakening from deep sleep!
I suspect she’s the one that’s grown into the really big and really talkative doe.
Here’s the point:
When I was in a situation new to me, the things that should have raised alerts with me (the cattle mooing in a certain tone meaning they see a human coming and hope for food) did not, whereas sounds that indicated all was well (raccoons don’t get frisky on your front porch if there’s a guy standing on it peering in the window) did not.
Once I got to know my place — its sounds, its rhythms, its occupants — my security and ability to interpret correctly what was going on increased.
When the tone of the redwings changes, you know there’s an intruder around. What cues in your neighborhood give you that message? Thanks Alan D. Wilson for the image *
Most of us don’t live where talkative deer are a thing. We usually live rubbing elbows with other humans. Since most of us like some personal space, we often create it by mentally shutting out much of the bustle around us.
I know this because I for one can be the Queen of Oblivious. It astounds me (and those who know me) what basic facts about the world around me I can fail to notice. I’ve learned I have to be intentional about paying attention to my surroundings and people I casually encounter if I am to know them and notice when they deviate from the norm.
So suppose you do live in a city. You can’t depend on a change of song from a red-winged blackbird to alert you to an intruder. Do you recognize which people walking down the street live near you? Where the nearest water source is that doesn’t come out of a city pipe? Does it run in all weathers? Which alleys are through and which blocked in case traffic is so jammed up you may have a better chance running the back roads? Where along your route home there are vending machines outside the buildings? (There’s one tiny town near us that has a station with “The Blessed Machine”, so named when I really, really wanted a cold drink during a hot bike ride when all (ok, both) businesses were closed.) Do you live close enough to an interstate that you’re likely to get flooded with desperate people if the highway gets blocked?
Consider your shared spaces too. If your building were filled with smoke, chaos, and not much light, could you easily lay hands on the nearest fire alarm and/or extinguisher? Where’s the nearest AED? A good place to shelter from a tornado? How about a couple of exits other than the ones you normally use?
All of us have far more details in our world than we can attend to at any moment. The brain solves this by deciding what’s important and paying attention to only those things. The downside of this is that the brain is naturally pretty near-sighted: making good decisions about paying attention to pressing concerns but not naturally good at I may need to know that later. We are more prepared to respond to situations when we notice them early. To do that, we may have to be intentional about paying attention to those things we may need to know at a later time. There’s a big bonus in it though…it turns out it’s nice to get to know those folks, be they the person who regularly sells you gas or the especially talkative deer that hangs out near the pond.
*By Alan D. Wilson, www.naturespicsonline.com [CC BY-SA 2.5 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5)], via Wikimedia Commons
