Habits Defining the Normal – A Tribute to Concern

When I get two or three text messages from concerned family or friends abroad in the same hour, while it could be coincidental, I check the news. New casualties, injuries from the last siren as I continued working?

I have time to write, sitting in my home shelter, door sealed as required. Twenty minutes ago, an air raid siren made that imperative.

Stuck in my safe room, impatiently awaiting the message that it’s safe to leave, but another preliminary alarm came, and another air raid siren. I planned walking to the nearby supermarket. Sunshine time. My mind ran ahead, calculating where I’d find shelter, if necessary, on my way. Remember, writing “shelter” in the Waze app search, will direct you to the nearest shelter. Everybody in Israel is living this way.

We worry about the frail, people with disabilities, children, soldiers. I think about people in Iran. Innocent people. Compromised people. Frightened people.

I live my life in Hebrew, so to speak. In conversation with a friend in the US last week, referencing bombs that split and have a lesser impact but wider reach than ballistic missiles, I realized I didn’t know the English word. AI translations provided scientific names. Before I asked for a lay term, I saw a post in English about cluster bombs. That’s it.

Our knowledge about bombs, their range, their impact can be tracked to the media. But slower train service didn’t make the news. Not delays due to extended station stops as required to allow passengers to get to station bomb shelters. Texting Haim after a siren when he was on his way home from work, by train yesterday, he reported it was going 30 kmh. Why so slow? He explained. If explosive or otherwise destructive shrapnel from a missile (or an interceptor) landed on a train track, trains need to be going slow enough to stop in due time once it’s sighted.

Mostly, the outpour of concern from abroad defines my frame of reference. In our local bubble, we learn the same new things together and adapt our habits accordingly. Adapting habits is healthy, and public habits define normal behaviors. Until concern from the outside world puts them in perspective.