Fight flight or close eyes?

I am getting sick of sweating. It would feel purifying, but coming hand in hand with pollution and dust negates any positive effects. Heat does make you finely attuned to changes in temperature, to the point that any wayward breeze or 2 degree drop is a respite.

When I was young (ha, did I just write that?) i.e. middle school, I remember a few prepubescent 'babes' lurking in the third floor girls bathroom. it just so happens that it was frequently dim, and you had to go around a blind angle. I am gullible and startle easily, so they'd 'boo' and I'd 'AAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHH!!!' and kick them. Every time. My 13 year old soccer legs would bam, and they would be vanquished. This is how I remember it anyway. And THEN, it would be MY FAULT for reacting violently, when this was how it always manifested. This fight rather than flight instinct didn't fade with age, and in our sophomore year dormitory I brained Dawn with my cell phone (literally making her bleed) because she was chasing me during a water fight. All of this is too caution you against scaring me, but also to demonstrate this bizarre reaction. I do strive to not injure loved ones, promise.

Now though, I notice a change. Dozens of times daily I am in a rickshaw, taxi, bus, and there is an instant when life could end. Not being able to fight back, I close my eyes. And not in a tense comic sense, but in a deep breath, well, maybe this is it way. And that's just the visible danger. I like to hope that when it comes to big risks and bravery, especially where the heart is concerned, when the next chance comes I throw myself into it instead of closing my eyes. It comes down to a forfeiting of control, and a simultaneous trust in this system that is not my own. Most times what appears to me to be death approaching in four wheel drive is likely here a valid traffic signal. It reminds me of all the near dogfights I've seen here- you think, oh god, I don't want to see this, any second a throat will be ripped out, a mangy ear masticated, then the process unfolds and dissolves.

When it comes to the non-threatening but hard too see- this city is peopled by some of the least fortunate most literally and demographically injured people I have ever seen, I try to keep my eyes glued open. I noticed it even more through my Mom's eyes, through her overarching compassion, and feeling my own cynicism I feared a hardening of myself. I notice it more having been away from the city.

Going home late last night, the world seemed to be just too full of suffering. Whole families live in the traffic dividers, these not even one foot wide chunks of concrete with six lanes of traffic speeding by are people's... homes. What a sick word for these non-homes. An old woman nurses her ill husband, a young woman clutches a sack of tiny bones, her baby and sleeps through the chaos. If any one of them shifted, perhaps flinging an exhausted arm above their head, or kicking out in a dream, their limb would be ripped off by passing traffic, they are that close. A block later, people are lined up like sleeping matchsticks for perhaps fifty meters. I'm weary of always reacting, and then analyzing my reaction, and then analyzing my analyzation, and then feeling sick with it all anyway.