How to reconcile all of this? I, a woman who's never responded to an American flag with anything more stirring than benign indifference, feel deeply, surprisingly, wholly patriotic and also, perhaps less surprisingly, deeply skeptical, mistrustful that our political and military response will be anything but rash, expensive and short-sighted. I feel protective and defensive about the depth of hatred toward America, a mama bear guarding her cub, and I feel humbled, aware that we've played no small part in earning and fomenting that animosity. And I also feel ashamed, embarrassed by the self-constructed cocoon of ignorance and complacency I've been living in: Until last week, I could not have spelled the name Osama bin Laden, let alone told you what degree of threat his organization represented.

Our culture thrives on black-and-white narratives, clearly defined emotions, easy endings, and so this thrust into complexity exhausts. Too many feelings competing for head space, no happy ending in sight, no tacit belief that our minuscule attention spans will protect us this time, and little solace from our ordinary opiates -- movies and sports and computer solitaire. The people I talk to feel an odd, almost adolescent yearning for leadership, craving and mistrusting it in the same breath.

Some of us feel compelled to reach out -- give blood, light candles, sign petitions, anything! -- and simultaneously compelled to retreat, edges of paranoia leaking in, talk of terrorists in the backyard. I feel catapulted from one extreme to another: protected one minute and vulnerable the next, heartsick and then detached, connected and then estranged, so full of goodwill one moment I'd like to hug the guy at Starbucks who pours me my coffee, so irritable the next I'd like to slap the man who cuts in front of me while I'm trying to pour milk. Mostly I feel unmoored, some rock of permanence and safety having given way to shifting sands, the familiar now eerily unfamiliar. Sirens sound different, scary and consoling at the same time. Work feels irrelevant. Normalcy as yet undefined.

I suppose this is what people mean when they talk about being stunned -- this gamut of feeling, which overwhelms the psychic system, leaves you feeling exhausted and powerless and unable to tease out one emotion from the next -- and I think the response is both human and frightening. Surely, it's one of terrorism's intended effects, to literally stun our morale, to blow up strength and will along with buildings, and the reaction is hard to counter.

On Saturday, still feeling blank and enervated, I spent part of the afternoon at a gathering of people who met to talk about caring for a mutual friend, a man who's dying of cancer at the age of 49. The lens shifted suddenly, the unfathomably wide panorama of disaster yielding to a much more personal and individual close-up of tragedy, and it suggested something to me about the numbing effect of emotional overload, which can so easily mutate into a kind of hopeless despair. I did not particularly want to go to this meeting; I drove there feeling fragile and depressed, but I showed up anyway, and sat in a room with 20 other people, and faced a loss in a communal and reflective way. We talked about how we felt about watching our friend die, what we were scared of. We talked about practical things we could do: cooking meals, doing laundry, spending time with him.

Unlike the thousands of lives so hideously obliterated without warning, this man and the people who love him have an opportunity to approach death consciously and with foresight, to say things that need saying, to help one another without the mobilizing impetus of disaster. This, too, is exhausting work, but it's important work, its value immediate and tangible, and it reminded me that the line between feeling stunned and being passive can be very thin. I can give blood. I can send money to relief organizations, I can write letters and sign petitions. I can also be present and active in my own small world, which is a gift that cries out for recognition, even from this stunning roar of mixed emotion.

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