Awareness Is Not Fear: A Practical Safety Layer for Uncertain Times
Staying oriented without living on edge
On awareness, orientation, and moving through the world with clarity
With perspective from Tegan Broadwater
With the holidays coming up, I wanted to share this now — something you can read, save, or come back to when travel planning feels quieter.
Over the last few weeks, more people have said some version of the same thing:
“I don’t feel afraid — I just feel more alert.”
Travel feels different right now.
Public spaces feel different.
Even familiar places carry a slightly sharper edge.
This isn’t about fear.
It’s about awareness — how to move through the world with calm, confidence, and practical situational awareness, especially while traveling.
That feeling isn’t weakness.
It’s awareness trying to find language.
A short Safety & Awareness Guide (PDF) accompanies this post — written in Tegan’s original language — if you want something practical to save and return to.
One of the most important distinctions I’ve learned — slowly, and sometimes the hard way — is this:
Calm and complacency are not the same thing.
Awareness isn’t paranoia.
It isn’t scanning every room.
It isn’t assuming the worst.
It’s orientation.
It’s knowing where you are — physically, emotionally, intuitively — and letting that knowledge steady you rather than tighten you.
Why I asked my brother to help with this
Some of you know my brother, Tegan Broadwater, works in security. Long before Nigel and I began slow traveling, he was the person I called when something didn’t feel right — not to scare me, but to help me think clearly.
What he shared with me over the years was surprisingly consistent:
Most safety isn’t about reacting to danger.
It’s about noticing before things escalate.
It’s about posture, timing, exits, patterns, and intuition.
It’s about staying awake — not afraid.
Given everything happening in the world right now, it felt wrong to keep that thinking private.
So I asked Tegan to put his approach into words — not as a checklist of threats, not as a fear-based manual — but as a way of moving through the world with quiet awareness.
What follows here isn’t the guide itself.
It’s the thinking that shapes it.
One way this awareness shows up in practice
One of the simplest habits Tegan relies on doesn’t involve scanning, suspicion, or staying on edge.
When he enters a new space, he asks one quiet question:
If something changed right now, where would I go?
Not to imagine worst-case scenarios.
Not to stay alert all night.
Just to orient.
That brief mental note is often enough to calm the nervous system rather than activate it. You don’t need a perfect plan — just a loose sense of layout, flow, and exit. Once you have it, you let it go and return to the moment you’re in.
And if something later feels off, that early orientation makes it easier to leave without overthinking or justifying the decision.
Preparedness, in this sense, isn’t fear.
It’s permission to move early — and move calmly.
The thinking behind the guide
These aren’t instructions — just the underlying principles the full guide expands on.
Awareness starts before you arrive.
You don’t need a perfect plan — just a loose mental map of where you’re going and how you’ll leave.
Calm comes from orientation.
When you enter a space, notice exits and flow once. Your nervous system relaxes when it knows where it is.
Trust early signals.
If something feels off, you don’t need a fully formed explanation to justify leaving. Quiet exits count.
These principles don’t shrink your life.
They make it easier to stay open without being careless.
Read the full guide
The complete Safety & Awareness Guide — in Tegan’s original language, expanded and unabridged — is available here:
Download the full Safety & Awareness Guide (PDF)
(Opens in a new tab)
For paid subscribers, this PDF is also included in the Safety & Logistics section of the Slow Travel Toolkit.
But whether you ever subscribe or not, this way of thinking stands on its own.
Awareness isn’t fear.
It’s respect — for yourself and for the world you’re moving through.
💛 Kelly
About the Author
Tegan Broadwater is a security professional with decades of experience in threat awareness, risk assessment, and real-world decision-making. His work focuses on helping people think clearly about safety — not through fear, but through preparation, attention, and calm judgment.
This guide reflects how security actually functions in everyday environments: through early awareness, pattern recognition, and small decisions made well.
You always seem to nail it, Kelly. I’m hanging onto this one …”It’s about staying awake - not afraid.” You always help me with the discernment of thinking through decisions that can feel scary because they’re not the norm, and reframe them to something more rational than the typical extremes. You guide me back to what I call the “common sense middle ground” where logic and dreaming can coexist. I look forward to reviewing the guide as I plan to live in Mexico for the next two months. Perfect timing! And many thanks to Tegan for his experience and valuable insights. 🙏
Thanks for sharing this Kelly, and for writing it Tegan. Good practical advice that lets us move with more confidence, not fear. 💙🌎