I choose not to live in fear

Do you feel secure when you climb into bed at night? Do you feel safe once you’ve checked all the locks and latches, set the intruder alarm, and made sure you have the security company’s number pre-dialed into your phone?

Do you go to sleep with the fob beside your bed, the panic button ready, alert for the call that isn’t a night bird, for the breaking of glass in the darkest hours?

Is this a night in your South Africa? Do you sleep peacefully? I’m guessing not.

It’s a funny thing, security. At my house in the Cape I lock the doors at night, and I close the windows, then I go to sleep. When I visit my childhood home, we lock the doors, we close windows, and then we go to sleep. In both places I zonk out like a felled tree, sleeping through the night, mostly undisturbed.

And yet recently I visited another friend’s home, where going to bed was a different story altogether: the surrounding electric wires were always on, atop a palisade fence, the gates were bolted, the doors and windows were locked, the perimeter alarm was activated – if anyone crossed the beam, the entire neighbourhood would be awoken – and the armed response folk were at the ready. I slept badly. Every sound was an intruder, every creak a nefarious footfall, until at 5.30am the perimeter alarm did go off, and I was upright at once, quaking. We snuck about looking for the source, until the alarm company arrived.

But it was just monkeys. I stayed for a few days and it was lovely, yet even when I sat outside on the balcony I was hyper alert, knowing the perimeter alarm was off, knowing we were exposed.

Cocooned in security, I thought I would be relaxed; instead I felt on guard against whatever it was against which I might need such extreme protection.

Then I thought of people I know who reside in secure estates and live in fear, of the folk who won’t go out at night, of the people who won’t walk on the streets at all so scared are they.

That’s the thing about locking yourself inside: the fear becomes reality, and the only strangers you’ll ever meet are those who’ve forced their way in.

I don’t want to live that way. Perhaps I’m tempting fate. Or perhaps I just don’t have anything worth stealing.