Rosalie Cushman Considers: Japan's Catastrophe levels life in tsunami's wake...The view from Olivenhain.
The earthquake and resultant Tsunami in Japan is a leveler like all catastrophic events. It creates instant equality, prompting those experiencing it to reevaluate life in an instant. Some recognize the animal instinct, and fast, and act on staying alive with tenacity. Some surrender to the inevitable ‘cause of their passing’ into death. Still others who survive make immediate decisions to help another in the most astounding ways.
Or not. One thing is certain: nothing in the physical world is as potentially catalytic on a personal level as this kind of catastrophe. The instantaneous choices some will be forced to make will reveal themselves to themselves. It is their impulse and actions that speak to meaning and value like nothing in the physical world: no bank account, title, position, or lack thereof. Not one thing!
My son was in the Tsunami in Thailand some years back, and survived. His story is harrowing of which I only know a small portion. Even with time’s passing, he speaks little of it although its impact on him is telling. I know he and his girlfriend, along with another couple, were all on a dive boat. The boat capsized and they all went into the water. Lots of chaos amid the debris was all around them, along with other bodies, some dead, some alive.
The shortest version is they remained in the water until being rescued and, once on shore, helped resuscitate some. Others would not be brought back to life. They found several people on shore who were separated from family members, lost in the immediate aftermath, unknown as to their whereabouts or if they were even alive. None of us non-tsunami witnesses can ever know this overwhelm-ment. Nor, can we know what instant decisions any of those surviving were called to make, let alone its emotional toll.
It was only last year my son told me while after being capsized , they tried to hold a 7-year old boy aloft on a piece of debris. He was severely injured and bleeding badly. Several of them were treading water, keeping the boy suspended, while trying to stay afloat themselves.
There is far more story here, not to mention all that followed even after they made it to shore. Suffice it to say, they and anyone else faced with having to make hair-trigger decisions of a similar nature, are confronted with not just the animal instinct to survive, but more importantly, a higher Self – that part of each of us that identifies what we value and hold in our hearts as having the greater meaning.
Sometimes it becomes ‘shall I save myself at the expense of another?’ Shall I help another if it costs me my own life? Or, shall I let another ‘suffer’ even if it looks like they will likely live but under horrific conditions, bleeding and maimed, emotionally ravaged while I get to ‘higher ground?’
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What any of us live for, and what any of us humans are willing to die for, is always individually determined. Yet for some, the decision is made in a collective context, potent and powerful, staggering in its very proportion to what we believe ourselves to even be. Natural disasters are the great equalizers and true tests – far more so than any man-made war – as to what an individual truly values.
There will likely be many tested now and in the days to come, in Japan and elsewhere, affected by the quake and its resultant Tsunami. Some will come to see there is no physicality that compares to the connectedness with a fellow soul that they will experience as profoundly.
Others may miss the point. One thing is certain – all will receive equal opportunity to re-evaluate what life and living means to them, either in the immediate moment or later on. Some will come to know its depths. Others will have less capacity to understand it in those terms. For all of us witnesses, we have yet another opportunity to look inside ourselves, to see what we value to the greatest degree--- to the degree we are willing or able.
To be continued…..
