It’s hard to know, when you blog, if you should or should not carry on business-as-usual when events elsewhere in the world are turning people’s lives upside down, when they are losing everything they have including life itself. You don’t know whether to stop your activities until it seems more appropriate to continue, or to carry on enjoying life as usual as a means, also, of giving thanks for it. You don’t know if you should say anything about what’s happening, knowing that words ring hollow and have the weirdest way of being self-serving in the end. You don’t know what’s right.
So I guess, like everyone, I’m just going around with my thoughts today. Doing what I normally do, but with a different feeling. A different sense. A different understanding (or utter lack thereof). The weather seems to speak for all of us. Appropriately, it’s raining. Or maybe those drops that keeping falling from the sky are the world’s tears.
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It is all so devastating. So sad.
Well put Charlotte, you’ve summed up the way a lot of us are feeling. Thanks for giving voice to much that’s heartfelt and important.
Diane
thank you Diane.
I agree, it is hard to know what to do when you can do nothing to help, except in the form of donations. I know, first hand, what devastation water can cause. Looking back, the damage to our house in the recent Brisbane flood was nothing compared to what we have seen in Japan. You wonder how the people who have survived can ever get over this.
Even as I’m horrified by the images coming from Japan, I can only seem to focus on Lori in Tokyo. Actually, it’s her children that are constantly in my mind. I see a picture of a terrified and confused child, and I immediately flash to the kids on a beautiful spring day in their Arlington back yard. I suppose I can’t completely wrap my head around the horror so I go to a safe and comfortable place instead.
It’s interesting that I hadn’t realized that I was doing this until I read this post. I guess that I – like a lot of people – just can’t quite comprehend the magnitude of what has happened, so I mentally try to escape it. In many ways, I think I feel guilty for the comforts I have. Perhaps instead I stop long enough to feel the sadness that is really overwhelming.
Oh my. I completely forgot that Lori was there. Is she still there? Have you heard from her?
Did you see the post this morning? Lori sent the kids to Manila with the nanny. We’ve confirmed that my stepdaughters’ relatives and all their grandmother’s friends are safe. Now I just have to worry about Lori’s safety.
I just re-read that last sentence, and feel astonishingly guilty! I can only think that this tragedy is so overwhelmingly frightening and I feel so very helpless that I feel safer tucking the whole situation into a box of “thank goodness that’s not me,” and going about the rest of my life.
OK, I’m not really that callous, but it’s closer than I like to think. I am helpless, I suppose, and I really hate that. So I will just go on with the rest of my life today, but I hope that I can at least remember that I have a pretty fabulous life.
What can I do? Maybe I can be a little more grateful, and show it in my actions today: be a little nicer to the guy at the 7-11 who is always in such a sour mood, say thank you to the checker at the grocery store, pick up the trash in the park without complaining about the litterer, text the girls and tell them again how proud I am of them, and tell my husband how grateful I am that he is in my life. Maybe that’s “all” I can do while people are living in mortal fear. Maybe that’s a pretty darn good second-best.
Oh, and maybe I can be happy being where I am instead of being jealous that you’re in France!
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