Big Love

A short exercise can be revealing

Close your eyes and picture yourself in bed in the middle of the night. Suddenly you hear a loud knock on your door. It’s the Sheriff alerting you that there is a house fire nearby and you may need to evacuate so you should prepare yourself.

Let’s say you have five minutes. What do you take with you? What don’t you take?

I did this exercise as a creative writing warmup at a workshop for creating a digital story. It the warm and well lit space of the workshop I got into it. However, this was nothing like what it actually felt like to have to go through this exercise in real life, in the middle of the night, with the smell of smoke and sound of alarms.

Once I lived by a person who set fires. We didn’t know it was a person at the time and as far as I know the setting of the fires remains unsolved. This led to two separate fires in my quiet neighborhood, both of which I was awoken from in the night, by a Sheriff, and told to prepare to evacuate.

Real life or not, this exercise poses some insightful questions:

Are you ready?

What matters to you that you would save in a fire?