Living Life: Natural Lessons

Nature is a very fascinating thing. The Japanese Tsunami was a horrendous thing to happen to people, but away from the emotions, you cannot help but gape at the monstrous and almost godly force of a wall of water sweeping up ships into the mainland, or the chaotic terror of having wall pictures falling down because the earth cannot stop shaking. No wonder new video footage of the disaster keeps captivating people because it’s all so artistic, the idea of a civilization built upon for centuries perhaps being reduced to the empty nothingness of a muddy mess for kilometres and kilometres – or the wall of white sweeping order away, as viewed from the sky especially in a country where order is next to life itself. It all looks like a movie made for the ones above – the enormous amount of utter total unimaginable chaos, which gives way to ordinary days and nights after a few minutes. The same can be said of the so-called Arab uprising, where ordinary humble people suddenly decide that they are fed up of being shoved around and unleash their emotions on the power that be. The leaders all panic, pretend to be strong, soon become rabid, killing a few people in the hope that it all goes away and at the end of the day, a huge “day of departure’ arrives. The two sets of people, you would think are different species, but no, we are all humans who when natural order imposed by men gives way, the natural disorder of the world and other things universal just takes over. All these crazy things happen even when men have spent thousands of years writing political doctrines that supposedly hold or do not hold; scientific forms of prediction of earthquakes to make the damage expected lesser than it would, and even tsunami warnings to make sure people flee when the sea raids the land. It all makes you think – why are we humans so keen to progress, to develop, to study to run away from the vagaries of un-civilization, ignorance and the like, when all it takes is one stroke of an earthquake, a tsunami, an eruption of human anger to change the status quo. But again such questions defeat the fact that men are the intelligent mammal – the one to think for the rest of life on earth. But however hard we are scared of the challenge of organizing the world; we just have no choice but to make a good shot at it. Even when nature gets angry and unleashes a wall of water at you, throwing around the huge signs of progress like ships, houses and road around like toys, we have got to keep going at it. I wish you a natural Sunday. kelviod@yahoo.com