"Heads up" is shorthand for situational awareness, that place of being alert to what's going on around you but without paranoia or fear.
In my book, Escaping the O-Zone, I compare it to defensive driving. When you first slid behind the wheel in that first drivers' ed class, you started training your brain to stay alert to changing conditions on the road and to the actions of other drivers. Think of situational awareness the same way: it's defensive living.
The first person who benefits from a defensive living strategy is you. Staying aware of your surroundings lets your intuition work freely to spot trouble. And by "trouble" I don't necessarily mean a mugger with a gun coming out of an alley. The other day for me it was something just as simple as noticing a bunched up throw-rug that nearly sent me sprawling. I tell my safety team at church all the time that physical hazards in the building, slippery floors in a rest room, broken asphalt patches in the driveway, even a light fixture that isn't working, could pose a danger to them as they pursue their duties but especially to our aging population.
So who else might you help by staying aware of your surroundings? Your family, of course. Every time you remember to lock the door between your house and garage, to install a timer that turns on your outside lights at night, or just to remind your son or daughter to keep enough gas in the car when going for a long drive, you're keeping others safe.
A friend of mine recently called the park district to report a light out, and broken glass on the ground, in a field where children play. A neighbor alerted the rest of us to the presence of a strange car parked on the street. In the news recently, I read that a husband and wife buying lunch at a burger joint noticed a teenage girl's bruised face and notified police, who subsequently discovered she had been kidnapped by a cross-country truck driver.
You may not disrupt a terrorist attack when you tell authorities about an unattended suitcase in an airport. The guy loitering near a school may just be a father waiting for his child. A senior citizen might never trip over that debris you see on the stairs.
But you never know.
