The new way of living seems to be filled with watches and warnings. Early this afternoon, my cell phone began honking in the middle of an interview, startling both me and the reporter.  I jumped up and tried to figure out where the noise was coming from, I thought an appliance had gone mad.

I didn’t ask for any warnings, I figured out that this was a civil defense alert, when catastrophes occur warnings are sent over cell phones, I’m sure many people reading this have received them. An abundance of caution I think, the new rationale for more warnings.

This was a tornado alert, warning of tornadoes, high winds and hail, urging precautions and preparations. Get inside, get ready, go into the basement if necessary, and I looked outside and saw a dark and quite menacing cloud hover over the farm. The air was still. There was hail and some heavy wind nearby, but no tornadoes came, thankfully. I’m not suggesting the warning wasn’t valid or necessary, I couldn’t really judge. The sky looked quite threatening. Up the road, hail the size of golf balls rained on farms.

Everyone in town was talking about the warnings, also the dangers from new kinds of tick-born diseases that are lethal and going around. Be careful, people told me.  My friend Scott told me to watch out, the worst ticks are too small to see. How, I wondered, am I supposed to watch out for ticks I can’t see?

You’ll get awfully sick, he said. Take it seriously. I will try, Maria and I walk in the woods just about every day of our lives, I have already had Lyme Disease, somewhere out there, there is probably a tick waiting for me to bumble along on the path. Scott and I love one another, we often warn each other about things. I warn him about working too hard, and he very reliably ignores me.

I am trying to understand a world so full of warnings.  It seems life is becoming dangerous. The weather has become serious, and a lot of people are profiting from our concern about it. They sell warnings, I can purchase them on the weather sites for five or six dollars a month, then I can be warned on the hour. I can’t say the warnings are not necessary, perhaps they will help convince a doubting world that climate change is real and will threaten us and our children.

I get warnings online all the time now on sites and in alerts – about my heart, food, the dogs, health, dog food, human foods, hackers, identity thieves, regular thieves, the heat, tomatoes, defective cars, predators, frauds, deer, terrorists, dog thieves, getting old, not having money for retirement or health care. My mother-in-law, who is 86, bought a shredder to destroy her documents and bills.

On my recent train ride to and from New York I was warned every five minutes to say something if I see something, I felt a bit reckless taking a nap. In New York there was a camera on every street corner and more warnings. At the baseball park, I went through a metal detector and emptied my pockets. Ipads are not allowed at the ball park.

Everywhere, there were signs urging me to report suspicious people to the police. I would hate to be a suspicious acting person on a train, it was as bad or worse as the animal police driving around snooping on farmers.

What would a suspicious person look like? On the Amtrak video he was quite politically correct, of indeterminate rage, age and ethnicity. He seemed kind of bland and inoffensive to me.

I am thinking more and more these days about the meaning of the word Orwellian. I’ve used it to describe the authoritarian logic of some elements of the animal rights movement. The word is sometimes used to describe a particularly anti-libertarian government policy, but it is also sometimes used to describe the peculiar, nonsensical thought process behind  the fictional Oceania’s social structure–a thought process in which ideas that are obviously self-contradictory are accepted as true based on the fact that an authority figure is asserting them.

Government enters our cell phones without our permission, ostensibly to frighten us, but of course if they can talk to us, then they can hear us, I guess we already knew that. Amazon knows more about me than my mother ever did.

An abundance of caution. Corporations tell me every day that they care about me, but then they don’t, shuffling me to outsourced caring people in Asia who can’t talk to me. I feel quite safe in my life even though deer run into our car and i almost died last year of heart trouble. I think the idea of an abundance of caution is Orwellian, it fits into the idea of a peculiar and non-sensical thought process. One disturbed man fails to detonate explosives in his shoes, and a nation has to take their shoes off in airports forever. To be safe. An abundance of caution, I think. Nobody much objects, so it must make sense.

I want to live my life a certain way, a spiritual way, that is not always compatible with so many warnings. I want to be selective about the warnings I listen to, I am wary of living in a fearful world where I must be vigilant all day every day. Frankly, I can’t keep track of all the things I am supposed to be careful about. I told Scott I didn’t want to hear any more warnings, even though I knew they came from a place of love. I just don’t care to live my life in so much fear, there is a point – it is personal to every single person – when the cost of being so vigilant overwhelms the point of living.

If you are warned about dangerous things all day every day, the world will cooperate and will soon enough seem a dark and dangerous place. Can anyone really keep up with the warnings and alarms?

This thing about warnings and alarms is different for every person, but I am thinking about it more and more.

Perhaps the real issue is that our world is becoming more dangerous, perhaps we are becoming more anxious and overwhelmed with warnings. I would think the world has been much more dangerous than now for much of human history, think about 1940, they just didn’t have cell phones that honked at us about it and sent out so many e-mail alerts.

I love life, I think it is glorious, challenging, fascinating and filled with magic and mystery. I cherish every of it, and I have my own warning. Do not be afraid to live your life. Live your life every day as if it were the only day of your life or the last. Do not waste it in fear and alarm.

And I have Henry David Thoreau’s warning up on my study wall next to my computer:

“Live in each season as it passes; breathe the air, drink the drink, taste the fruit, and resign yourself to the influence of the earth.”

This is a warning I am happy to get, I wish I could get my cell phone to warn me every day about a life lived in fear. I will heed iyt every day of my life.