This is a very heavy topic andI hope this is the right place for this- yesterday my classmates and I got put on lockdown and we thought we were going to die, and I didn't know how to handle the fear.

So for the past couple of years I've spent a lot of time reading about Eastern philosophies and studying various religions and it's done a lot to change the kind of person I am. There are a lot of things I don't struggle with anymore because of the way I've learned to approach challenges, but yesterday something happened that I was completely unprepared for.

Yesterday in my Econ class at the high school I go to, we heard one of the administrators call a Code Red over the intercom meaning that we were supposed to go on lockdown. What happened was a different school in our system had been threatened, but they called a lockdown at every school just in case. We only found out about this after the fact, so everything that we knew about the situation came from the terrified look on our teacher's face.

She had to run out the door to look the outside doors of the building, so we were left alone and everyone completely froze. I feel like I got this part right- I stood up and said "We have to move, now." and we all got up. I told someone to turn off the lights, somebody else closed the blinds, and we waited for our teacher to come back.

As we had been moving over there I heard someone say to their friend "Hey, cmon bud, we have to move" and he could barely respond. When we were in the corner someone that couldn't see that well asked me if their boyfriend was with us. When our teacher came back in and locked the door, she told us she didn't know what was going on and that it wasn't a drill.

So after years of hearing about school shootings, after going to the March For Our Lives in Atlanta and seeing kids our age talk about how terrifying it is to have your life threatened in a place you've practically grown up in, we felt like we were in the exact same situation. There were about 30 of us, some of us quietly prayed, I had my prayer beads in my hand, and we all watched the door and listened for gunshots. We were waiting to die.

This lasted for about five minutes until we were told to go on 'soft lockdown' and our teacher could check her email to tell us what was going on, and that we weren't in any danger.

When we were huddled up in that corner I wasn't calm or relaxed or mindful of the moment- I was thinking about who I was going to duck behind if someone came in with a gun. I believed before this that when I was inevitably faced with death that I would be okay with it, because through Daoism I have a better understanding of what death really means for us. In that moment I did everything I could to remind myself of this, and to think about the various heavens and afterlives that I've read about, and every piece of wisdom I've taken and applied from Buddhism, from Daoism, from Zen, and it all felt like a toy that I was clinging to. In that moment of crisis, none of my beliefs felt real.

I was so completely terrified of dying, of my friends being shot, and there was nothing I could do to give me any confidence about what might happen next, and I felt a completely unmanageable and alien fear.

So the reason I share all of this is because I want to know what everyone's take on this is. How does Daoism regard this kind of situation? What kind of De can exist in a crisis situation?

Thank you for reading through all of this- I hope some of you have an answer.