Most of us have a quick, practiced way of getting out of the weather. We rarely notice it happening, because it usually starts before the weather arrives. A tone of voice, a certain kind of silence, a number on a screen, and something in us has already moved.
Why do I go quiet the moment things get tense? Why do I leave the room in my head while my body stays in the chair? What am I actually protecting when I pull back?
I've had a lot of years of being very good at this. Staying busy, staying reasonable, staying a little ahead of whatever might be coming. It looked like competence from the outside. From the inside it was mostly bracing.
Some shelter is just good sense. You come in out of the rain. The harder thing to see is how often I was running for cover from something that was only a look, or a pause, or a thought about what someone might think.
What if the shelter shows up before the storm does? What if I'm sheltering from the idea of the weather, more than the weather?
And there's a question underneath it that I keep returning to: when does a place to rest turn into a place to hide? It's rarely obvious from the inside, and the same room can be both on different days.
I wrote about the gap between what arrives and what we do with it in The Prism and the Clutch.
If you've noticed when and where you go to ground, and you feel comfortable to share it, I'd like to hear it. Private, under your name, or anonymous, whichever feels right to you.
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