Who is your contact?

Emergency contact, noun, refers to relatives and friends who can be contacted when one encounters illness, accident, or personal danger when filling out personal information.

Don't know if you've ever experienced a moment when you need to fill in a form with an emergency contact? In that moment, can you immediately think of a name and write it all the way down? Or was there a moment of hesitation that you needed to think about in your heart?

I remember when I was in Beijing, when I first joined a new company, I filled in the employee information and filled in the names of my parents without hesitation in the emergency contact column. A few years later, when I first went abroad to fill out my personal information, I was at a loss when faced with the same column.

Yes, who is the right person to be my emergency contact? I've had a whole new life in New York with many things back home that people don't understand. If I fill in the names of my parents and they come from thousands of miles away, they may not be able to open my computer and find my various documents and materials, not to mention the doorway to all kinds of trivial matters in a big unfamiliar city. .

However, what friend of mine is worthy of such trust? Is he willing to accept a bunch of trouble because of me without complaining about it? I am also willing to entrust my everything to him, and I believe that he can handle it like me? I didn't have an answer at the time, I couldn't be sure of everything, and sitting in front of that form felt like I was floating in a void, just as far away, up, down, left, and right.

Looking back on it today, the feeling that I couldn't find anyone to be the emergency contact for a while was actually the sudden realization that I didn't have a safety net under my body. The safety net is not a real rope net, but a conceptual net.

When you come home alone in the middle of the night, you feel fear or calm, depending on whether you trust the local police force, trust the local law and order, trust the street lights and all the strangers living around you. You believe that they are all well-intentioned, and you also believe that they are willing to take action, then you are lying on a safety net, and you know that even if you walk alone at night, you will not have any security risks.

But have you seen it with your own eyes? Have you verified it yourself? not at all. You just hear it, feel it, because of road conditions and housing prices, but you have a concept of safety, and you lie on the Internet of this concept.

Seriously speaking, in this society, in a certain city, who can you really rely on and trust? I think the answer for most people should be parents. But what if the parents are not around, or if the parents are old and frail?

If you think about it like this, the feeling of suspension will come back to your heart, and you will feel that everything depends on yourself, and your situation is lonely and helpless. Fortunately, man is a social animal. Socialization means that we are able to weave a network of relationships of our own from scratch. The most basic function of this net is to solve personal loneliness, help us spend our leisure time, and find some fun in life.

In the part of this net, especially near oneself, it is actually necessary to weave a tighter and finer net. A person always has to find three or five good friends, we all go through a life together, support each other and cheer each other up. Once there is such a net, one no longer feels that one is suspended somewhere in the void.

Of course, this solid feeling can also be used to doubt, because everything is untested, and you don't know what choices they will make in a very extreme situation. But even so, before the test comes, this web of concepts exists, and you can truly feel safe and secure while lying on this web.

When one is closely related to someone, and everyone has some kind of common life, common experience, or even just common interests, people will feel fulfilled and happy because they are among their own people.

Why do I stress so much "common"? Because the strength of this network depends on how much everyone lives and experiences together. In my life experience, people go a long way from familiarity to trust. Familiarity can bring intimacy and intimacy, but there is always a layer of careful, courteous movements. Trust, on the other hand, requires long-term interactions and a deep understanding of each other during the interaction.

You can think of trust as a numerical value where people gain or lose some credit points with every interaction. When one's own credit points accumulate to a certain amount in the other party, then real trust will be formed. Therefore, everyone must have a common life, and thus have a common experience. It is in these experiences that each person's performance allows others to choose whether or not to fully accept it.

After a person stumbles into the adult world, everything around him is unfamiliar, and he feels extremely uneasy. With such a small group of people around them, everyone explores the world together, and because they participate in the process of each other's transformation from unfamiliar to familiar in the new world, this trust will be deeper and more sincere than other trusts.

Each other has witnessed how each other's worldview, values ​​and ways of doing things are gradually determined over the years, then the other party will become their benchmark in the world. Wandering alone in this world, he will not know his position. When a group of people explores together, they can use their relative positions to each other to determine where they are going. The sense of security brought by such a network is equivalent to one person mastering the whole world.

In this small group of people, there should be their own emergency contacts. It's like I now, whenever I need to fill out a form, I don't hesitate to pick a name, but not my parents.

The reason I can give myself to each other with such complete confidence is that after ten or twenty years, we have become unrelated relatives. We have both seen each other's most embarrassing moments, and shared the bright moments in each other's lives. We know all the flaws in each other, and we carefully avoid them when we can't change them.

More importantly, we have experienced many times and the storms of life together. Especially when the situation is not conducive to you, you can persuade the other party to follow your heart and make the right and difficult choice, and you will not deform your heart because of pressure and difficulties, and become a person you don’t even know.

Then, when I fill in the emergency contact, I know that no matter what happens to me, the other party will definitely make the best choice for me based on our many years of experience together, and this choice will not contradict my personal will.

I'm not worried about the problem of entrusting everything to the other person, I've thought about it too, and the conclusion is: if the worst happens and I have to fall into the end, then I hope the switch is in my on the hands of emergency contacts. Whenever I think about this, I feel incredibly relieved. Instead, I will be the emergency contact of the other party. I believe that the other party has the same idea.

Life is too long to think about every midnight. Think about who you are, where you are, what you are going to do, and where you are going. Once the thoughts fly, the cold, dull loneliness will shroud.

After all, everyone lives alone in this world, falling in the endless void. It is therefore necessary to find a net on which one can land. It's even more necessary to find that emergency contact in your life, so you know that even in the worst case scenario, you're not alone or completely disconnected from the world.

I hope you will never hesitate to fill in your next name at any time, and I hope that name will never betray your trust.