Tragedy

How do we make sense of tragedy, both in our own lives and in the world? Why is tragedy a part of the human condition? What is its power that lures and repulses?

In a single act of fury, Mother Nature claims more than 20,000 lives with the death toll still rising. Was it cruel? Can we blame God for the loss of life particularly if they were near and dear ones? Yet is not what Nature doing what she merely is supposed to? Who is to 'blame' or is blame even the issue? If no one or nothing is to be blamed, why do we weep? Why do we weep for what is as natural as death?

The greatest irony is perhaps the fact that despite how we claim to have conquered the skies and the oceans with superior technology we are unable to stop something as natural and 'simple' as a geological fault that stirs a wave of tsunamis, or something as natural and 'simple' as death. It is perhaps a true awakening of human arrogance.

Some of my colleagues were appalled by this disaster that they wept when they read the news. I, on the other hand, frighteningly perhaps, felt little. And as I returned back to school today and observed the hustle and bustle that was part of the many camps occurring in school, I thought to myself - we are indeed so de-sensitised to death and destruction. As the world around us, quite literally, weeps and mourns, we laugh and make merry in anticipation for the new year seemingly oblivious to the suffering that is around. We make plans, projections and forecasts - as though we knew for certain what the future could and would be ...

I find such an existence most uncanny ...

It is perhaps a macrocosmic representation of our own personal lives. When we trod through suffering and pain, the world around us seems to move on and we claw for attention asking why? We ask why would the world not stop for us just for those moments and pay attention to our pain.

But life moves on ...

And the real tragedy of the human condition isn't death, the loss of life, or the pain and suffering that abounds - it is the tragedy of remembrance and forgetting; it is the loss that is found in forgetting. That, perhaps, is the real tragedy of being human - we forget.