My Safe Place
If a time traveler from the past were to pay a visit to our day and age, he’d be hard put to figure out the way we use certain words. Expressions that we toss around freely would be a source of perplexity. Take the words “safe place,” for example. What do they mean to you?
For anyone facing actual physical danger, it would literally mean the place where he feels safest. A walled fortress, perhaps. An underground bunker, impervious to even the most determined of missile strikes. Or simply at home, with the doors locked to ward off the dangers that lurk in the street.
This is a concept that anyone, from any era, could easily grasp. The overriding emotion is fear, and the overwhelming desire is to escape the reason for that fear. Huddling behind reinforced fences makes sense when there’s a chance of sustaining a dangerous attack from the outside.
By adding one small word, however, we could render the phrase much opaquer to our befuddled time traveler. “I’m in my safe place” would seem to indicate a location whose safety-giving properties are uniquely my own. Which implies that the place is less about safety from external harm, and more about an inner feeling of being protected.
The dominant emotion may still be fear, but the danger has a less physical form and a more social one. The form we call insecurity.
The average person spends a good part of his or her time in an environment that demands a certain social savvy. In the workplace, at social events, even when negotiating our most mundane errands, an insecure person spends a lot of time wondering if she’s getting it quite right. Is she living up to other people’s expectations? Striking just the right note of sophistication? Putting on her best show for public consumption?
It’s the “public” aspect of her activities that brings out her insecurity. At home, with the doors closed, the shades drawn and the public nowhere in sight, she can finally relax. Draw in a lungful of air unobserved by strangers. Venture a remark that will not be run through the judgement mill.
Home. Her safe place.
But our homes, however secure, can nonetheless be fraught with tension. Relationships within a family can get intense. Money problems, medical problems, or any other kind of problems can make you long to get away. To go someplace where you can feel impervious to the daily pressures and irritants that keep your nerves jangling day and night.
Someplace safe.
In Search of an Idyll
As we all remember, when Donald Trump won the 2016 presidential election, many young people, mainly students in liberal colleges, declared that they felt suddenly unsafe. Therapists had a heyday with this sudden pervasive insecurity about the future of their country. Special “therapy dogs” were brought on campus to comfort the disconsolate.
Any change can bring on a sense of being less secure than we’d like, but this was a reaction carried to an absurd extreme.
There was no one banging down the gates of their college campuses to threaten those students’ lives. What was in danger was their own sense of the rightness of things. Viewing the country and its values through a certain prism, they responded to the election of that particular president the way innocent civilians might react to an invasion of menacing soldiers in hobnailed boots. Fear and insecurity reared their ugly heads. The reaction was an emotional one rather than a response to a literal threat.
Fear may be a response to an objective danger, or it can be the way we react to a highly personal perceived danger. Either way, it summons up a compelling desire: to be somewhere else. Somewhere safe.
As the therapeutic process has come to play an increasingly present role in modern society, the phrase “my safe place” has leaped the borders of the psychologist’s office and made itself at home everywhere. Feeling stressed? Socially uncomfortable? Emotionally under attack? There’s a simple solution. Close your eyes… and go to your safe place. In your mind.
This is usually an imaginary setting where beauty is dominant and peace reigns supreme. The harsh bogeymen of fear, stress, and insecurity have no place here.
Behind closed lids you picture someplace lovely like a coastline, with waves coming in long, rolling breakers while a glorious sunset paints the backdrop in shades of pink and purple. How about a bucolic countryside, all flowing green fields and sparkling blue lakes, with a splendid, snow-peaked mountain range standing sentinel in the distance? Or maybe a sylvan forest scene, complete with babbling brook and its resident Bambi…
Any idyllic spot where your heart rate can settle, your pulse can relax, and you can feel utterly at peace with the world and yourself.
The Place of the World
One of the names by which we refer to our Creator is Hamakom, which literally means “the place.” Hashem is the Place of the world.
Let’s extend that a little bit. Hashem is, for each of us, the safe Place of the world.
Nearly two years ago, years ago, my husband was in the ICU after suffering a heart event. One night there was some sort of crisis, and a whole team of medical personnel crowded around his bed to help stabilize him. When things had settled down, I approached the lead doctor, an intense, energetic Asian woman, to ask her about the patient’s condition. She glared at me and spat out, “Your husband is a very sick man!”
Her words, as you can imagine, landed on my heart like a cold hammer. But a second later, I caught myself. With absolute clarity, I found myself thinking, “It doesn’t matter what you say. You’re not the doctor. Hashem is the Doctor.”
I had plenty of occasions to repeat that mantra to myself throughout my husband’s hospitalization and recuperation. That vivid realization stayed with me throughout the ordeal and kept me strong. Hashem is the Doctor. He’s also the Lawyer, and the Landlord, and the Plumber and everything else we might need. When life and its rush of events throws fear and stress and insecurity at us, it’s easy to duck them all if we can only remember that one little fact.
Hashem is all we have, and all we need.
He is our Safe Place.
