By Jane Gordon Julien
November 1, 2025
I live in New York, which terrorists like to target and where muggers make a decent living. So I watch out.
Not that I have any control over terrorists or muggers.
I also live in New Jersey, where the ocean is so close I can hear it from my front porch. Two nights ago, the wind shrieked and the waves tore at the heavens. I watch out there too.
Not that I have any control over the ocean.
I spent October far from both places, visiting my daughter and her newborn son across the country in San Francisco. San Francisco’s streets are, for the most part, quiet. So quiet that when I took a more-than-an-hour walk to the Mission District, I saw maybe ten people.
San Francisco’s weather is also quiet. It’s cool. Predictable.
One could get lured into thinking San Francisco is more predictable than other places. But then, during my visit there, the Fates sent a reminder out.
In my case, it happened one day when I was tidying up my daughter’s apartment, trying to be helpful but not intrusive on the living space.
On a table sat a pile of papers, most of which looked like junk mail.
I sifted through.
A pamphlet caught my eye.
Black background, school-bus-yellow lettering. “EARTH QUAKE” it read.
It went on: “MOST CALIFORNIANS LIVE NEAR AN ACTIVE EARTHQUAKE FAULT. WHAT CAN YOU DO?”Well, for me, an ardent East Coaster, the most obvious answer was: MOVE.
I know all about the 800-mile San Andreas Fault, one of the most dangerous geological entities on the planet. And now, according to National Geographic, of which I am a subscriber so I can keep up on where disasters might happen just in case my stress levels aren’t high enough, the Cascadia Subduction Zone is a major threat.
Whereas the San Andreas’ fault has registered at its maximum a 7.9 magnitude earthquake, the Cascadia Subduction Zone is believed to have the potential to register higher than a magnitude of 9. A bigger earthquake that could trigger a tsunami from Vancouver downward for a thousand miles. Together, these threats would vaporize the West Coast.
I went to bed and stared at the ceiling the rest of the night, waiting for the bed to shake. Not that I have any control over earthquakes.
The next morning, my phone rang. My husband was calling from our apartment in Manhattan.
“You’re never going to believe this,” he said. “You know Armand, our neighbor? I think he was in his late forties. He died last night in his sleep.”
We knew Armand. We know his wife and daughter. It was an earthquake of another kind.
If there’s any wisdom to be gained here, it’s that life – especially these days – is totally, unequivocally, astonishingly unpredictable. One moment, the sidewalk is holding you up. The next, you look down and it’s gone.
In his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Viktor Frankl, an Austrian neurologist who survived the Holocaust, wrote, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms —- to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Terrorists and muggers, earthquakes, an angry ocean, a crazy world: for each of us, how we approach those uncertainties makes all the difference in how we live our lives.
Every day, we get to decide which path to take.