If You're a Run-To Danger Person These Times are Extra Hard

Learn to pause or go insane

1986: I was on my way to work early in the morning, and traffic suddenly started slowing on the interstate. People were pulling away from something, and when I got close, I saw a motorcycle down and the rider bleeding all over the ground.

I jumped out of my car and ran to him. His arm was bleeding and, from the angle, was broken, but he was conscious and able to talk to me, albeit with a very shaky voice.

I ran back to the car and saw I didn’t have a jump kit (box of medical supplies) with me. I ran back to him, waving traffic around us. In full view of everyone, I unzipped my jumpsuit, tore off my white T-shirt, zipped back up and, and got pressure on the bleed with the cloth.

I talked to him calmly while the white T-shirt bloomed bright red patches like a bad tie-dye job. And very soon, I heard sirens coming.

The ambulance grabbed him up, some guys dragged his motorcycle to the side of the highway, and I walked back to my car. I went on to my job as an Emergency Medical Technician and thought very little of it.

2003: I was driving in the car with my teenage daughter. We saw a collapsed dog on a leash and a man on rollerblades yanking and shouting for it to get up.

I yanked the car to the side and intervened by putting my body in between him and the dog while calling animal control. In her Goth phase, my daughter, wearing a huge collar with massive metal spikes on it and a mohawk, stood in view.

He kept trying to get me to move, but I refused. I yelled in “Mom” that he’d exhausted his dog and what was he thinking and did he know his dog could die, etc.

The animal control officer arrived, and by then, the man (young man) was in tears - it was dawning on him to see the situation from his dog’s perspective. He was cited and ended up thanking us as the officer gave him and the dog a ride home.

2013: I was in a bar and a man sitting at the table with us started seizing and fell off his chair. I shouted for someone to call 911, shoved chairs out of the way, and told everyone to stand back.

My husband at the time had run out of the bar as soon as the chaos began. I found him on the sidewalk outside.

I realized he was a run-from person.

These are just 3 short examples pulled from thousands, as my immediate response is to run toward the danger as fast as possible and fix it as best I can.

I am a run-to person.

This has served me and many others, and also, in times like these, it could land me in a state where I have one foot in the grave and the other on a banana peel.

My instinct to run-to almost had me on the way to downtown Atlanta to march on the capitol about the utter fucking nonsense going on lately.

My instinct to run-to has been fully in motion, but there is no effective motion for me to take other than phone calls and doom-scrolling.

I sketched out plans for where we should store food, where we could hide people, and how much food we would need to support everyone.

I watched the sun travel through the yard to assess where we could put in raised garden beds as the Georgia red clay grows nothing but racism.

I thought about how bad things would have to get for me to be able to kill a chicken for dinner, even though I come from Mississippi, dirt-poor cracker folk who killed a chicken every afternoon for dinner when they had them.

This energy with nowhere that feels useful to go is ruining my life, making me useless in the long run, and believe me; we are in for a long ass run of this garbage.

We know from past experience that the current administration loves to say things on purpose to activate the shit out of us, back down while claiming the other guys backed down or claiming another person’s victory as their own, and nothing comes of it.

What’s different this time is an unelected Pied Piper madman has been given a permission slip to stage a coup with a bunch of children in tow.

He doesn’t care what this may do to their futures. He doesn’t care that we all know since he’s never been involved with his kids before; he now carries a little boy around on his shoulders, not from a sudden interest in parenting but as a human shield. He is well-known for having no empathy whatsoever. He is well known to be a na8i supporter.

So this time, the louder the orange one gets, the more you can be sure that the na8i is doing even more shady shit elsewhere.

And still…taking a pause is better than running toward.

If you’re a run-to person and have nowhere to run to, this will trigger procrastination in the extreme because you will for sure fall into some shade of freeze response.

These times are better suited to the run-from folks who take a moment to assess - is this something that we can intervene physically with, or do we need to take approach A, B, or C?

These times are better suited to the cooler heads who understand legal strategies and the big picture more than I do.

These times are better suited to the pause, the take a breath, the look behind the shit storm to see what’s really happening, people.

I‘m not one of them but I am quickly learning how to ask - how critical is this?

Does this need 5 messages, or can it be reported and handled in due time?

Do I need to read fifteen different perspectives on the same latest dangerous act, or can I stick with a couple of sources I trust, make the calls, and move on with my day?

Can I stock up a reasonable amount of supplies to make my small self feel a little safer and consider contingency plans but not take a ton of action yet?

These are better questions to ask for the run-to people:

• What can I actually do today?

• Who can I support?

• Who can I comfort?

• Who can I encourage?

• Who can I inspire?

Us run-to people can run to people.

We can take care of the ones in front of us. We can feed, we can provide, and we can “do”. We just have to make our doing a little bit different.

Please take care of yourselves. Please sleep. Feel all the feels as they flow through you. Pet the pets and watch the sunlight travel across the land.

We need all the run-to and the run-from people to get through, so know which you are and honor your nature.

We are in this for the long haul, but we are in it together.

XO,
LMW

P. S. If you want to open up your intuitive abilities and truth-detecting senses, we are still enrolling into Woods & Writing.