Emergency Kits and Magical Thinking

The forecast turns bad, the real kind of bad, and a certain kind of person goes quiet and purposeful and begins to prepare, and if you watch them closely — if you are one of them, and I am one of them — you will notice that the preparing has two halves, and only one of them is about the storm.

The first half is sensible, and I will not knock it. You need the batteries, on this coast; you need the water and the flashlight and the food that doesn’t need cooking, because the power does go out and the road does close and the ferry does stop, and a person who has laid in the basics is simply a person who has been paying attention. That part is not magical thinking. That part is just Tuesday, here.

But then there is the second half, and the second half is where it gets interesting, and tender, and a little irrational, and it is the half I actually want to talk about. Because past the point of sense, the preparing keeps going. You have enough batteries and you buy more. You have a flashlight and you want a third. You fill the bathtub with water even though the town water is fine and there is no reason on earth to think you’ll be reduced to bailing out of a tub. You check the kit, and then an hour later you check it again, not because anything has changed but because checking it does something for you that the checked kit itself does not. And if you are honest in that hour, you know that the extra flashlight is not going to save anyone, and you buy it anyway, and the buying is the point.

What the extra flashlight is for

Because here is what I think is actually happening, in that second half, and I only worked it out by watching myself do it: the excess preparation is not for the storm. It is for the fear. It is a place to put the helplessness.

There is a storm coming, and there is genuinely nothing you can do about the storm — you cannot turn it, or slow it, or protect the people you love from the fact that a large dangerous system is going to pass over the small house that holds them — and that helplessness is unbearable, and the human animal does not tolerate unbearable helplessness well, and so it finds something to do with its hands. It fills the tub. It buys the third flashlight. It lays in more than any reasonable person could need, because the laying-in is the only available action against a thing that permits no action, and doing something, anything, even something useless, is how a frightened person gets through the hours before the weather arrives. The over-prepared kit is not a miscalculation of risk. It is a coping ritual wearing the costume of a risk calculation, and it works, and there is nothing foolish in it at all.

And notice what it is you actually pack, past the point of sense, because the objects are not random. You pack for them. The extra water is for the children. You put in the thing your mother would need, the medication reserve, the small comfort. The excess is always aimed at the people you love, never really at yourself, and once you see that you understand what the kit truly is, which is not a survival measure but a love letter — a plastic tote in the closet full of everything you could think of to do for the people you cannot otherwise protect, assembled in the one form that helplessness allows, which is provision. You could not stop the storm. But you could buy the batteries, and lay in the water, and fill the tub, and by God you did, all of it, everything you could think of, for them, and it steadied you, in the bad hours, to have done it.

The disappointment nobody admits

And here is the part that gives the whole thing away, the small strange fact that proves it was never really about the storm: the disappointment.

The storm turns, or weakens, or misses. The power stays on. The kit goes unused. And you are relieved, of course you are relieved, that is the sane and dominant feeling — and underneath it, if you catch yourself, there is a tiny, absurd, unspeakable flicker of disappointment. Not that you wanted the disaster; you did not. But you had made an offering — you had spent the anxious hours assembling your love into a tote — and the offering went unaccepted, and there is a part of the human heart that feels, obscurely, that a prepared-for thing that does not come has left the preparation stranded, the ritual unconsummated, the love-letter unopened. You put the flashlights back in the drawer, a little sheepish, and you would never say the disappointment out loud, and you feel it anyway, and it is one of the truest small signals there is that the kit was never a calculation. Calculations do not disappoint you when they turn out to be unnecessary. Offerings do.

So I fill the tub, still, when the bad forecasts come, knowing full well the town water is fine. I buy the extra batteries. I check the kit twice. And I have stopped feeling foolish about it, because I finally understand what I am doing, which is loving my people in the only language available to me on the night before a storm, the language of provision, of laying-in, of having thought of everything — and if the storm misses, and the tub drains unused, and the batteries go back in the drawer, I let myself feel the small silly disappointment, and I know it for what it is, which is the residue of an offering, made in fear, out of love, to a sky that does not take requests.