Many years ago, when I and the institutions for which I worked were less aware of issues of accessibility, I used to teach courses which blended outdoor activity with creative writing. It was good to get people away from screens. I enjoyed the planning and teaching, the ways I could show students that making art is physical, embodied work, that being in places is at once natural and cultural because to be human is to be in nature and in culture. (I have since developed more inclusive ways to do this.)
At the back of my mind, as I planned and led these trips, was always the dynamic assessment and management of risk. I had learned the basics in a childhood of mountain climbing: read the weather forecast and also the sky; the group might string out in good times but generally moves at the pace of the slowest member; make sure someone knows where you’re going and when you expect to be back; carry first aid and emergency supplies and know how to use them.
Even so, after the first year I asked for and was given more formal training. I joined a class learning mountain leadership and advanced first aid, the only woman and certainly the only literature professor in the group. First aid classes are always a strange and sobering experience – hours or days spent pretending that the worst has happened, leaving participants at once disturbed and prepared.
The mountain leadership training was less alarming than the new parents’ course I took after my infant son half-inhaled a plum, but some of it was a touch brutal. We were told not to start CPR unless it was reasonable to expect medical assistance within 10 minutes. Otherwise, the instructor said, you’ll exhaust yourself when you still have to get everyone else off the mountain and feel responsible when you have to decide to stop.
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Another lesson was triage. Don’t go first to the person making the most noise, because anyone who can scream patently has a pulse and an airway and is responsive to pain. Attend to the quiet casualty.
I thought about this when I overhead someone this week tell her friend to “remember that there’s always someone worse off than you”. It’s self-evident, of course: if you’re able to tell someone that you’re suffering, your situation is less serious than that of someone unable to voice pain. Assuming death is the worst thing that happens to us, as long as we’re alive things are worse for someone else.
But the phrase has always annoyed me. Am I supposed to take comfort or pleasure in the greater hardship of others? Or is it that there’s a suffering competition and I need to try harder if I want to win? Either way, the message seems to be that expressing pain invalidates it, a catch-22 in which silent agony is by definition greater than anything you can say and also, conveniently, makes no demands. Shut up, stop complaining. If you don’t stop crying I’ll give you something to cry about.
As often – the one about oxygen masks on planes comes to mind – what’s good practical advice in an emergency is not a good guide to loving human relationships. Crisis response is a misleading metaphor for quotidian care.
[ My ears prick up when someone says ‘to tell you the truth’Opens in new window ]
Most of us do not live in emergency, and for those who do, the stripping away of nuance and complexity is part of the problem. If your daily life requires you to triage the survivors of mass casualty events, go to the quiet ones first. But the people I know whose work does involve such realities are among the most lovingly attentive to their friends’ expressions of sadness and trouble, and when that attention falters they recognise the warning signs of burnout.
We should not be always relating to each other as if we’re burnt out and it’s an emergency. Burnout and crisis are problems demanding remedy, not model behaviour. The best things we do and make are not born of hunger and fear and abandonment.
Urgency justifies conduct that’s not otherwise advisable, whether that’s abandoning your cabin baggage or administering last-ditch medical treatment without informed consent. Rigid thinking, simple-mindedness and extremism thrive on crisis narratives; the hard and necessary course is to hold on to flexibility, ambivalence and open-mindedness. In any life, culture, nation, there are periods of crisis, but emergency is not, and must not be allowed to become, the baseline for being human.
