Tragedy
The
tragic death of Anthony Bourdain, of Kate Spade; wealthy and famous,
influential-glitterati should give everyone pause to consider just how fragile
we all are, how easily any one of us may succumb to despair.
The
things you have, or have done, the stuff you have accumulated, the accolades; by
themselves they are not enough, and they will not sustain us, or keep us whole.
There
are billions of us in the world, human beings, most of whom have no choice in
what they do with the hours in their day, they are busy surviving, with no
spare minutes to set aside for reflection, or to wonder why, to contemplate
justice, the meaning of existence, or the purpose of life.
Woe
to those who do, because the world is a troublesome place, both beautiful and grotesque,
like the flight of an eagle, as Saint Augustine said; nature is red, in beak and claw.
I
have no insight into the lives of Kate and Tony, the particularities of the
despair they endured, but I have dozens of friends that took their life into
their hands, to end it, to set aside their burdens and move on.
I
grieved for them, I grieve for them still, crying at the memory of them and
over my own helplessness sin the face of what they endured.
I
could not help them.
They
could not help themselves.
Many
of them suffered in silence, with few people, or even no-one knowing what was happening
inside of them, behind the veil of their persona, in that infinite-space behind
their eyes.
There
are moments, especially when I am driving on the freeway at night, when all I see
are taillights in front of me and headlights passing me by, when I get caught
up in the sense that every-single light, lights as far as the eye can see
signifies the presence of an individual human being, a person just like me.
Each one carrying with them their own private world of experience, their own
collection of hopes and dreams, of pride and shame, of successes and failures.
Each has their own story of trauma; traumas they have endured, traumas the have
witnessed, traumas they have inflicted on others.
I
call that moment the existential fugue, because
in that moment time becomes meaningless.
The
demands of compassion are such that we are called on to remember this, to at
all times keep in our heart that we do not know what is taking place in the
lives of the people we encounter in the world, even in the lives of our friends
and family, of those closest to us, let alone the stranger. There are places
within each of us that we cannot share, that we never disclose, that we can
hardly look at ourselves, for the pain that it brings.
Compassion
call us to simply accept this and them, as they are, as we in turn desire to be
accepted and understood.
