By Margaret Bacon
It has occurred to me that most of us are still guided by instincts built for a much rougher coastline. We wake up in old houses that have seen a few Nor’easters. We glance toward the harbor, check our phones before coffee and worry about parking near Abbot Hall.
Yet we carry habits shaped by cold Atlantic nights, uncertain catches and boats that did not always return when expected. The puzzle is not that we behave strangely. The puzzle is that we behave as if the margin for error is still razor thin.
Take criticism. A single sharp remark can lodge in memory like a pebble in a shoe, while a dozen compliments are politely deflected and quietly forgotten. This is not insecurity. It is training. For most of human history, missing danger was fatal.
Or consider snowstorms. The forecast mentions six inches and Crosby’s looks like final preparations for a long voyage. Milk disappears. Bread vanishes. Eggs are treated as negotiable currency. By morning the plows have passed, the lights are on and the espresso machine is humming. Yet something ancient in us insists: Store it now. Winter may have ambitions.
We still scan for threats, only now they arrive in zoning proposals and email threads rather than on the horizon. The brain that once watched for privateers now monitors the Old & Historic Districts Committee agenda with similar vigilance.
Our instinct to belong remains strong. In a town where family names echo and history is layered like old paint, standing apart can feel riskier than it is. Once, isolation along this coast could mean real trouble. Today it usually means a cool reception at the post office. The nervous system does not revise its estimates.
We also love patterns. One development proposal becomes the end of Marblehead as we know it. One slow drive through town and we are suddenly certain traffic has permanently doubled. Our brains are wired to treat what just happened as what will keep happening. Once, that instinct kept us alive. If the wind shifted once, it might shift again. We still carry that reflex.
Even our leisure reveals us. We binge shows and scroll feeds while living in a town that once required navigation, patience and nerve. We prefer the tidy victories of cleared inboxes and watching a progress bar fill to 100% than the deeper satisfaction of mastering a skill that cannot be rushed.
None of this makes us foolish. It makes us descendants.
We hoard because scarcity once stalked this place. We replay mistakes because errors once carried consequences measured in lives, not comment sections. We react quickly because delay once meant a lost opportunity.
The difficulty is that Marblehead is no longer a windswept outpost waiting on the next catch. Yet our nervous systems continue to behave as though every alert deserves urgency and every snowfall demands provisioning. When you find yourself stewing over one criticism, defending a minor position as if it were a constitutional amendment, or buying more milk than six inches could reasonably justify, it may help to remember that you are not malfunctioning. You are simply carrying very old instructions into a place that no longer requires quite so much vigilance.
And on a good day, you may notice, and decide that one loaf will do.
Margaret Bacon is the founder and senior editor of VeryCoolFacts.com and Safe Harbor Media Group, a scalable educational media platform built around verified, insight-driven storytelling. Her work explores history, science, culture and the enduring patterns of human behavior that shape how we think and act today. She is based in Marblehead.
