Why you should read The Gift of Fear

According to a recent article in the Chicago Sun-Times, a screener at the Portland airport on 9/11 could have changed history and saved lives if he'd only trusted his gut instinct. Michael Tuohey screened Mohamed Atta and Abdulaziz Alomari before their flight to Boston that morning. In Boston they boarded American Airlines Flight 11, which they ultimately crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers.

Atta's appearance and demeanor set off alarm bells in Tuohey's mind:

"I said to myself, 'If this guy doesn't look like an Arab terrorist, then nothing does.' Then I gave myself a mental slap, because in this day and age, it's not nice to say things like this," Tuohey told the Maine Sunday Telegram.

This is why I wish everyone would read The Gift of Fear by Gavin de Becker. Internationally known and respected security expert de Becker tells us that we humans have instincts that warn us of danger and enable us to protect ourselves -- if we heed them. These instinctive warnings are derived from clues and cues that we may not even recognize consciously. For example, Mr. Tuohey's gut feeling that Atta was a terrorist didn't come solely from the fact that he was an Arab. He was picking up on Atta's facial expression, his body language, his one-way ticket, and countless other clues which taken together added up to "terrorist" in the mind of this experienced airline screener.

Already some are blaming political correctness for Tuohey's failure to act, but according to de Becker it's more complicated than that. The very fact that we're civilized can work against trusting our instincts. He gives the example of a woman feeling hesitant to get into an elevator alone with a strange man, then rationalizing away the fear: "Oh, I'm just being silly. It would be so rude of me to refuse to ride with him. I'm sure he's perfectly harmless." Maybe he is and maybe he isn't, but if he sets your Spidey sense tingling, that's reason enough to wait for the next elevator.

Please read this book. I originally checked it out of the library, but later bought it because I like to re-read it every now and then and keep its lessons fresh. It's not often that I can recommend a book that could literally save your life -- but this one can do exactly that.

Communication, and a remembrance of things past.

Communication has changed so much, not just in my lifetime but actually in my adulthood. I was discussing this the other day with Firstborn. He is literally on the other side of the world, eight time zones ahead of me; and yet we talk for a couple of hours every Saturday. I sit at my computer in the morning, he sits at his in the evening, and we put on our headsets and chat about everything and nothing. And that's what it costs: nothing. (I <3 SKYPE!) There's no delay, and the sound quality is so good that he sounds like he's right there with me. (Once I had him on the speakers instead of the headset, and Young'un came downstairs, startled to hear his brother talking in the sun room!) That's our regular conversation. In addition to that, I can call him anytime from home, and if I'm at work I can log onto AIM via Sametime and get in touch with him that way. The only bad part is that there's no way I could get to him quickly. It would take a couple of days at the very least to get myself physically from here to there. That's a bit unsettling for me as a mom. Even when he lived in Chicago I knew that I could hop in my car and be at his side within 2 1/2 hours if I needed to. But other than that fact, we've remained as close as we were when he came home from work at 10:30 every night, and we'd talk while he made himself a late supper of Tuna Helper.

Contrast that to the summer of 1973, when I got married and left home for the first time ever. My husband and I moved to another town, about 70 miles from my parents. We were both nineteen and just starting out; I was a stenographer at an insurance company, and he attended college and worked part-time at Penney's. Suddenly my mom and I were out of communication, and that really was an adjustment for me because we were close. We never, never talked on the phone, because that would be long distance: prohibitively expensive. Every couple of months or so we would drive up on a Sunday afternoon, and visit both my family and my husband's -- but we couldn't do it more often than that, because gas cost money too. (A lot less than it does now, but still.) Some Sundays my parents would drive down, but they couldn't do that very often either because my husband's parents (actually his mother) didn't want to come down often but didn't want my parents to see us more than they did. (It was complicated.)

So my mom and I wrote letters. We constantly had letters to each other in progress. There was a model for this; Mom and her best friend who became her sister-in-law had been writing each other this way for more than twenty years. I fell right into the pattern. My letters to her were almost like a journal: I'd write a little each day, recording whatever of interest was going on in my life. She would do the same. When a letter from her arrived, I'd comment and answer any questions, then send my letter off to her. She'd have another letter started, and when she'd get mine she'd comment... and so on. I watched for bargains on boxes of pretty stationery, and wrote and wrote and wrote.

Sounds unbelievably primitive, doesn't it? If I had to communicate with Firstborn that way the delay would be even longer, because it takes a couple of weeks to get something from here to there and vice versa. His remoteness from me would be a constant fact, a big issue; painful and hard to live with.

However, there is one small advantage to the way my mother and I communicated during that long-gone time. Upon her death, I (as her only child) inherited all of her worldly goods. While going through these and making the inevitable determinations, I found that she'd saved every one of those letters I wrote her. One evening I sat down and read them all, and discovered a forgotten world. Surprising as this may sound, I really don't remember much about my brief, mostly unhappy first marriage. In those letters I found a wealth of detail about my day-to-day life at work, at home, and with friends. I had saved a few of her letters as well, and now I keep them all together, interspersed by postmark and thus as chronologically ordered as they can be (overlapping as they do). After I'm gone my sons can read them if they wish. If they do, they'll discover two women they knew and yet didn't know: their grandmother in her prime and their mother just launched into adulthood.