by Mindy Misener
Last week, as I was scraping the last bites of dinner out of my bowl and trying to have a real conversation with my spouse over the yodels of our seven-month-old, the power went out.
The first thing that struck me—other than the darkness—was the silence. Our wood stove’s blower shut off. The electric whine of the radiators stopped. The small buzz of the humidifier, the subtle hum of the water heater, and every other high-pitched, ambient white noise disappeared, revealing the quiet we’d been clogging up with our machinery. The fire flickered behind the tempered glass of the wood stove’s door, casting a very faint orange light across our living room.
It was almost peaceful, except, of course, it wasn’t. Outside, the temperature was negative eleven Fahrenheit and falling. Our wood stove can provide ample heat for one room if the fan is on. But the fan relies on electricity. So does heat for the rest of our house. Also, we don’t own a generator.
As anyone else who was affected by the outage Thursday night already knows, the power was restored after about forty-five minutes. And I should be clear that, given advantages like a working car and the ability to pay for a night or two in a hotel if need be, I knew we were not in any grave and immediate danger. Even so, I was struck by a feeling of vulnerability. The night, with its deep deep cold, suddenly seemed vast and uncaring. And I was small, and only human.
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I agree with the Buddhist teacher and writer Pema Chödrön who said, in so many words, that as we move through our adulthood we become, on the whole, either more vulnerable or more fortified, more open or more defended, more soft in our ways or more hard.
Powerful knee-jerk defenses and rigidity of thought give us things to do: make a plan, be stern and uncompromising, stick to our guns. Vulnerability, openness, and emotional flexibility, on the other hand, give us, first, much to feel. We have to allow our discomfort, our fear, our weakness. We have to come to grips with all we don’t know.
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That night, while my spouse researched the extent of the outage and contacted friends, I went through the motions of putting the baby down for sleep. I knew, intellectually, that there was at present nothing else for me to do. Even so, my mind kept flying off the handle—making a packing list, or wondering if a wood stove built into a wall would radiate enough heat to keep it above, say, forty degrees in the living room. Probably not. Would local hotels have power? On and on my mind churned, until I again stopped trying to fortify myself against a situation I still didn’t even understand.
It’s not fun to feel vulnerable. It certainly doesn’t fit into any standard categories of “self-help,” most of which are designed to make me feel more secure and stable. Maybe the most I can say for the experience is that it’s an honest encounter with who I am and who I’m not. What I can do, and what I can’t control. What I know, and what I can’t foresee. These value in these truths, as the saying goes, is that they set me free—to be a full, fallible human. To experience the whole sweep of what it means to be alive, in all its loveliness and all its questions and all its losses.
Had the power stayed off that night, there would indeed have been plans to make. We would have needed to be organized and clear in our direction. I’m glad the night didn’t come to that, for our sake and for the sake of our neighbors and friends. But I’m also grateful for the opportunity to reflect, again, on the tentativeness that defines my life and circumstances. May this reflection give me the compassion and clarity to see every life around me for what it is: a lived experience just as exquisite—and provisional—as my own.
— Mindy Misener teaches creative writing at Montana State University
and serves as Pilgrim's 2021 stewardship chair