Boston.

My dear friend TPO just wrote so eloquently about processing the fear from incidents like what happened in Boston on Monday.

“Incident” somehow makes it sound too small.  “Tragedy” too syrupy-oh-how-sad.  “Terror” makes it sound like it will win.  Just flat out “violence” is a better word.  Actually, a better word would be a phrase I won’t repeat here because I have family members I’d like to not disown me who read this.

Fear is such a deep emotion.  I had the privilege of being invited to be part of a “massage-a-trois” (get your heads out of the gutters – it was two therapists, one client) the other day.  A large part of that session was spent trying to loosen up the client’s hip, which had been completely “stuck” for weeks, and a large part of that effort was energy work.  The other therapist, about halfway through the session, stopped, her hands frozen in place, and said, “Fear.  I need you to know that this is fear.  It’s old fear, probably over 30 years old, but you need to let it go.  You can let it go.  You don’t need to analyze it, or think about it, or even really acknowledge it, but you need to know what it is, and you need to give your body permission to let it go.”

That conversation led to a conversation standing out in the hallway about things that get stuck in your body.  It’s true: The muscles are like little lockboxes.  Think about it.  When you’re scared, what do you do?  Do you fling your arms out to welcome it?  Or do you curl your shoulders in, wrap your arms around your stomach, clench your gut, and duck your head?  Your muscles don’t just feel the emotion, they act the emotion and, therefore, can hold the emotion.

Later on that day, I was sitting at my desk coding when the Facebook messages started coming through.  Boston.  Bombs.  Marathon.  Finish line.  “Shit!”, I thought (excuse me, family), “I know someone running that race!  One of my neighbors is up there!”  I turned the news on and watched.

When September 11 happened, I couldn’t stop watching. I was trying to force my brain to acknowledge “This is real.”  Days later when I found out a dear, life-long friend of mine was there, in the Marriot, running from the falling towers, covered with debris, I had to stop watching.  Suddenly, it wasn’t just THERE.  It was HERE.  I may have been all the way in New Zealand at the time, but it was HERE.  In my body.  In my heart.  I went from being a complete spectator who was basically rubbernecking to my mind suddenly slamming itself into her body, feeling it at an absolute gut-wrenching level.

Then Newtown came.  I didn’t know any of the victims, but I was once a good friend to a good friend of the aunt of Noah Pozner.  There was still some distance, but I couldn’t completely separate it out.  Social media meant I was watching the family’s pain through the aunt’s words and through the words of her family.  I watched, but not much.  I watched for information, not to try to reconcile or to force my self to acknowledge.  There was less of that barrier there.  I simply had not been able to throw that barrier up.

And now Boston.  When pictures started emerging and I started really looking, I told myself, “I’m seeing things.  That’s not her.  There were thousands in that race.”  But there, in so many of the photos, of the videos, and, in the following 24 hours, interviews, there was my neighbor.  Someone I’ve sat down across the table from at Starbucks.  Someone I don’t know all that well, but whose kids go to my school, whose house I pass daily.  She credits her safety to the fact that her family was sitting in the bleachers on the right side at the finish line.  She’d run most of the race to the left, but moved over at the finish to be closer to them.  The bomb went off as she was steps away from done.  She is safe, her family is safe, but they were right there.  They all saw it.

It’s hard to put up any kind of barrier when it’s that close, when things that scary get that close to home.  Yesterday, I stayed away from the news.  Instead, I chatted with a group of neighbors trying to figure out what we could best do to support them when they returned home.  Some left flowers, some took gift certificates to favorite restaurants or stuffed animals, someone took a backpack to replace the one lost by one of the kids in the chaos.  I bought them all journals.  “Just write,” was part of the note I left.  “Write what hurts your heart, write what scares your soul, write however you may like, just writing is the goal.”

It was all I knew to do, the only comfort I knew how to give.

It’s funny how when something is separate from you, when you don’t know anyone, don’t know of anyone, it can impact you deeply, but there’s a distance.  That barrier is easier to build.  But when you know someone, it’s like you can’t even get a foundation built for the barrier.  It’s unavoidable.  It’s real.  It’s scary.

The world gets smaller and smaller, and the smaller it gets, the harder it is to distance one’s self from what goes on around us.  For me, at least, that familiarity means it’s easier to feel the fear more acutely, much more deeply.  It’s harder to ignore it, harder to go on despite it.  And it’s harder to keep that fear from turning into terror.

But one must have hope.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Patton Oswalt, but he really did say it better than I can.

I remember, when 9/11 went down, my reaction was, “Well, I’ve had it with humanity.”

But I was wrong. I don’t know what’s going to be revealed to be behind all of this mayhem. One human insect or a poisonous mass of broken sociopaths.

But here’s what I DO know. If it’s one person or a HUNDRED people, that number is not even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent of the population on this planet. You watch the videos of the carnage and there are people running TOWARDS the destruction to help out. … . This is a giant planet and we’re lucky to live on it but there are prices and penalties incurred for the daily miracle of existence. One of them is, every once in awhile, the wiring of a tiny sliver of the species gets snarled and they’re pointed towards darkness.

But the vast majority stands against that darkness and, like white blood cells attacking a virus, they dilute and weaken and eventually wash away the evil doers and, more importantly, the damage they wreak. This is beyond religion or creed or nation. We would not be here if humanity were inherently evil. We’d have eaten ourselves alive long ago.

So when you spot violence, or bigotry, or intolerance or fear or just garden-variety misogyny, hatred or ignorance, just look it in the eye and think, “The good outnumber you, and we always will.”

Good will conquer evil.  Just like we must remember that hope can conquer fear.