I had an Emergency/Survival Packing dream last night. Do you have these? I have regular packing dreams, too, the kind where I’m going on vacation and forgot to pack so I’m trying to cram things into a suitcase, but I also have a more stressful variety where I’m packing because we’re about to have to hide out in the woods for awhile. That’s the kind I had last night. Furthermore, we were babysitting someone else’s little girl and I knew I’d need to take care of her, too. I set out a backpack for each child, and I was trying to decide which things were most important/essential. Flashlights? Bug spray? Canned/dried food? Change of socks? Blankets?—knowing that each child could only carry a small amount, and not knowing how much time I had to think this over before we’d have to flee our house.

I woke up still planning. A small shovel would be useful. Matches? Vitamins? Flashlights? Spare glasses? Sunscreen? We sure don’t have much survival gear at our house: no tent, one sleeping bag, no camp stove, no emergency radio. Most of the stuff we DO have would be worthless as soon as the batteries wore out. If we actually had to hoof it into the woods, we’d spend our entire day just trying to find enough food—and I don’t think we’d manage it. We could probably keep warm enough at night as long as it was the hottest part of summer.

Anyway, it was a really bad dream. All day today I’ve felt SO LUCKY. We don’t have to choose the few things we can take with us in a backpack: we have a whole house to put things in. We don’t have to forage for food: we can go to the grocery store. We don’t have to wash our only clothes in a murky river: we have bureaus, and so many clothes I can’t always get the drawers closed. There’s no one chasing us. There’s no one trying to kill us. We only need bug spray for when we go out to play. We can bitch about c-section rates instead of worrying about maternal mortality. We can bitch about breastfeeding/formula instead of worrying our babies will starve. We can worry about not having enough money to make the rent instead of not having any shelter at all. Even the very poorest people in this country don’t get expired food or holey clothing, even though we’d be knifing each other for those things after a week of genuine need.

Preachy much? I know—but that’s not how it seemed when I was saying it to myself in my head, instead of saying it here to other people. Same with how it’s totally different to advise oneself to have a little perspective, or to calm down, or to see things from the other person’s point of view, or to ask one’s own self to consider whether one might be wrong—versus telling someone else the same thing.

Anyway, instead of feeling preached to when I said those things to myself, I felt so much relief. To be worrying about whether I need psychiatric medication to feel happy, instead of worrying that I might not be able to keep the children alive. So relieved to be driving to the store to buy things, rather than digging in a garbage can and worrying about being hurt or killed by other starving people. I know those are exaggerated ideas, but everything feels so precarious: just as most of us would be in serious financial trouble within a month or so of losing income, most of us would be in serious STAYING ALIVE trouble within a short time of losing the electricity and grocery stores.

This doesn’t say anything BAD about us: of course we are adapted to our environment. It’s a waste of time and energy to learn/know unnecessary skills, so no one should give anyone else any grief for not knowing how to can food or darn socks or kill a squirrel with their bare hands and cook it over a campfire. We can’t all learn to do everything.

[This was published in January 2009. Then I opened it in February 2013 to check something, and somehow it unpublished and lost all the comments. SIGH.]