Maybe without the opportunity to make being our own that is provided by ruptures in our familiar world, we could not return to that world and truly inhabit it. Maybe without emergency, we could never truly belong. Our starting point – immersion in a familiar whole – may be nothing but the effect of forgotten emergencies. Emergency generates being, opening a world – but then we lapse or relapse *into* this world. Once again, we take the given for granted. The un-settling emergency that made genuine settlement possible tends to be forgotten as we settle into our home and settle for the quotidian. Fighting against this lapse would mean allowing ourselves to be vulnerable to emergency – an emergency that is not simply handed to us but which we must also seize; an event in which all being, including our own, would become urgent; an event in which we would fully *be there*; an event that would found belonging.
– Richard Polt, The Emergency of Being: Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy
Notes from a Room 