A Safe Distance

The war started while I was finishing something.

February 28th, the United States and Israel launched coordinated strikes on Iran. Khamenei was killed. Civilians died in Tehran, in a residential neighborhood in Beit Shemesh, in places I had to look up on a map. Iran retaliated with hundreds of ballistic missiles directed at US bases in Bahrain, Kuwait, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the UAE, at cities in Israel. By March 31st, day 32, despite what President Trump wants the markets to believe, there is no clear end in sight. The Strait of Hormuz, through which a fifth of the world’s oil passes, is effectively closed. Gas is above four dollars a gallon. Over a million Lebanese civilians have fled their homes in the wake of Israel’s invasion. Secretary Rubio told reporters the U.S.’s objectives, whatever those might be, could be achieved “in weeks, not months,” and now the president, who will apparently speak to the nation tonight, is threatening to pull out of NATO.

I know about all of this the way I know about most things: from a screen in Vermont. The distance between my iMac and Tehran is approximately 6,200 miles.

Meanwhile, I was finishing a Mac app I’ve been building for six months. It’s nearly ready. I also made real progress this month on a story I’ve been writing for so long I’m embarassed to type the number down, and a nonprofit I helped co-found is starting to get its footing in ways it hadn’t before. I also reconnected with old friends over a holiday weekend and felt the way you can only feel with people who knew you before you became whoever you are now, as if the gaps between when we spoke last were just intakes of breath in friendships that will never end.

I’m not cataloguing this to perform gratitude. The month actually went this way. Things I’ve worked for moved forward, real things, good things, while 32 days of explosions I’ll never hear killed over 2,300 people and put the world’s economy out of commission.

I believe in safety the way I believe in gravity: it’s not something you earn but something owed to you. The fact that civilians in Tehran don’t have it and you and I do isn’t something I can easily resolve. It just sits there, another fact alongside the gas prices and the president’s dementia-infused timeline.

What we can do is not look away. Al Jazeera has been running a daily tracker (14 civilians killed in Israel today). The House of Commons Library published a briefing on the broader conflict with lots of useful links. Armed Conflict Locations & Event Data (ACLED) released a regional analysis for March. I’ve been reading them and other reports like them. Learning that a missile targeting Riyadh was intercepted over Saudi Arabia. Knowing UN peacekeepers died in Lebanon. Seeing that a Kuwaiti tanker was attacked in a Dubai port. Trying to hold those things in the same mind I use to code my app and write my story and love my daughter.

Standing witness from 6,200 miles away doesn’t achieve anything for anyone in the path of a missile, but it seems like the least dishonest thing I can do from here.

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My better days, month after month, are the days I write fiction in the morning. On those mornings, the rest of the day opens up and I move through it differently.

The causality isn’t obvious. The writing itself is slow. I sit down without knowing whether the words will come or whether I’ll spend forty minutes trying to find a simile that allows me to avoid using the word “brown.” The output is not reliably good. But the process…the process is.

What I suspect happens on those mornings is that I force myself to actually inhabit something, to trace the shape of a thought or notice the distinct tremors of a feeling. The writing is the occasion for attention.

And this is the same thing as the walking I’ve been doing. The days I walk for real, not just a ten-minute jaunt to walk the dog, but a long walk where I actually leave the phone in my pocket and notice that mud season has arrived in earnest, that the ground is softer underfoot, that the trees look like they want to hit the snooze button just one more time but they know its time to get up, those walking days are better in the same way the writing days are better.

I’m not making a self-improvement argument. I already know all of this about myself. But I’m am trying to making an observation about distance.

The first kind of distance — from Tehran, from the missile over Riyadh — isn’t a choice. It was made for me back in the 1600s when my ancestors left the old world for the new. All I can do with that kind distance is to refuse the second kind, the avoidable kind, the scrolling and the skimming and the functional presence that doesn’t actually feel anything, the get-up-go-to-work-come-home-go-to-bed kind of distance.

Writing, inhabiting my body and mind deeply; walking, feeling the earth and the sky deeply, these help me break that second distance, keep me here, embodied and grounded.

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I was sick for about a week in March, and my wife stepped up in a way I won’t forget. My daughter thanked me two days in a row, without prompting, for taking her to the climbing gym. Old friends and I stood in the foyer at a party on St. Patrick’s Day and laughed together like no time had passed at all (which is the best possible verdict on friendships that have survived thirty years of distance).

My mother’s Parkinson’s has progressed to where she couldn’t make it to the St. Patrick’s Day party at my brother’s house, and my father had to lie to her so she’d think it was his fault. I saw it, and I think about it.

The world seems less understandable than it did last spring. My country is a belligerent in a war I didn’t vote for and the civilians dying in the war didn’t vote for it either, and I’m still here, the ground firming up under my feet, the trees doing whatever they do before they commit.

I’m going to take a longer walk today. I’ll notice the birds. I’ll leave the phone in my pocket.

That’s not enough. But it’s what I’ve got.