Doing a loop-de-loop

Once I lived inside the loop, connected closely to all the networks of power, a heady and exhilarating place to be until the network gets zapped with a zillion volts.

For a few years now I've relished being outside the loop, perceiving campus decision-making only as an echo of distant thunder. It's calm out here in the desert, quiet enough to allow me to hear little beyond the thumping of my own heartbeat, and one rarely sees anvils falling from the sky.

But even out here in the desert there are dangers. Ignorance is bliss until the anvil squashes you, and then it's too late to care. I keep learning important things long after the information could be useful, or else those distant echoes get garbled by the time they reach me and I'm miffed because I can't get the story straight.

What I need is a compromise situation: far enough outside the loop to avoid electrocution, but far enough in so I know when to expect falling anvils. Is it too late to make a mid-loop correction?