It’s right up there in Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs: the universal human want and need for personal and collective safety. Safety, in all its faces and facets, continues to be an elusive aspect of life for too many of us.

Just what is “safety,” and how it is achieved and sustained? Here in western Massachusetts, as elsewhere around the world, safety considerations include physical and bodily concerns, emotional, medical, social, food, environmental, family, and housing considerations — really, all forms of human endeavor.

Usually, we don’t go about defining a word by evoking its inverse — what it is not. But it helps for a moment if we consider what it’s like to live without safety: we live in fear if we’re not safe. Fear shuts us down; it moves us into a “fight/flight/shutdown” response. In his book “Life of Pi,” author Yann Martel shares a full two pages offering his graphic description and depiction of how fear plays out in our minds, hearts, and lives. Suffice it to say, it’s not pretty.

Instead, safety allows us to inhale, exhale, extend or stretch ourselves; even to take emotional, social, and physical risks if we so desire. When we feel safe, we feel free, liberated from the constraints and constrictions of only being able to act or speak in prescribed ways.

One cannot feel safe entirely on one’s own, in a vacuum. As humans, we are inherently prosocial, and are meant to connect with one another in myriad ways, to engage together in all manner of activity, thought, and feeling. When a community is fractured or broken, the connections and infrastructure that may have previously enabled us to thrive cease to be effective and efficient in any form of collective endeavor.

In author Kaleel Jamison’s framing, we become smaller, weaker, and frustrated and angry when we feel “nibbled on” (or through other and more pernicious forms of human interactivity) by others: this is also about a lack of safety on one or more levels. And many of us go about our days either feeling smaller than we should, or feeling we need to or should hide, maintain silence, or ignore ourselves or others, even to the point of minimizing our sense of personal integrity.

Another way of dealing with both real and perceived lack of safety and security is to act out — violence, bullying, shaming, abuse, and neglect, among others.

That said, safety is not a static state of being. It is fluid, dynamic, and evolving. Our history as a species clearly demarcates times and places where individuals, groups, and cultures have been forced into and out of safekeeping. We need each other, we need to have and hold one another’s backs, and, ultimately, to trust the people around us who form and inform community, in order to feel safe.

Safety and community don’t just happen: they need to be built, over time, and refined, on a daily basis. Governance by others elected and selected is not enough: We are each responsible for securing our and others’ protection and wellbeing.

For community safety to be generated and sustain itself, we must look both within and beyond ourselves and actively consider the needs and concerns of others, which will differ from our own. As our personal and collective needs shift over time to reflect the ever-evolving state of our community and our world, so to must we redesign and recalculate what makes us safe.

Cyber-safety, for example, is a relatively new concern in a world where this didn’t exist as a question or an issue even a generation ago. Extreme environmental degradation is another challenge that hardly existed a century ago. To minimize — even prevent — suffering, we must will ourselves together for the good and safety of all.

I must mention the critical importance regarding the development and maintenance of trust — trust in ourselves, trust in others — for any degree of safety to be present. Without trust, we regress in our ability to care for ourselves and others.

How do we create measures, policies, and extend the very essence of human kindness and care that will allow us to respond to our own humanly created obstacles? Without conscious invention and intervention, the natural law of entropy enables things not attended to to denigrate to the point of chaos. Most of us feel that chaos is not safe and so we orient ourselves toward preventing its occurrence.

Laws and governance can go only so far in protecting us from ourselves and one another — we can easily become our own enemy when we feel threatened or in harm’s way. This is where building conscious and conscientious community comes into play. Around this time of year, we Americans think about independence. I would suggest that we consider and live from a place of inter-dependence instead. And it takes all, each one of us to do so.

Think small and deep, and live large — the question being, “What I can do for the benefit and safety of my community?”

Daniel Cantor Yalowitz writes a regular column in the Recorder. A developmental and intercultural psychologist, he has facilitated change in many organizations and communities around the world. He is former chairman of the Greenfield Human Rights Commission and his two most recent books are “Journeying with Your Archetypes” and “Reflections on the Nature of Friendship.” Reach out to him at danielcyalowitz@gmail.com.

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