When will it be enough?

This December saw me waiting indefinitely for the fluffy, playful snowflakes that usually decorate our surroundings this time of year. But instead we have seen strings of turbulent low pressure fronts producing nothing but storms; violent winds and staggering amounts of downpour.

For more than a week now our coastline and its immediate interior has been battered by at times hurricane force winds only interspersed by shortlived spates of lull. The various live  news reports have brought us harrowing images of houses blown to smithereens, or deep gashes in the sloping hillsides where landslides have cut broad paths across fields and orchards. Yesterday, a 66-year old woman was interviewed outside what remained of her home of more than six decades, tearfully explaining why she couldn't contemplate living there anymore. Nothing remained standing of her house. Everything had been shattered to pieces, and in the pile of debris that now remained, the former occupant was frantically looking for a treasured heirloom: earthenware that she had once served hot meals on. But the long hours she spent looking provided nothing in terms of retrieved, intact personal belongings.

2011: blow upon blow across our earth

We're not as a nation alone in having been hit by the apparent whims of nature. This year's earthquake in Japan and the subsequent tsunami washing away entire communities, the deathly drought in the eastern regions of Africa and the needless loss of lives in its wake, the torturing floods of Bangladesh and Pakistan inundating entire cities and ruining vital crops - are all shocking reminders that life is terribly fragile at times. But even worse is the fact that these disasters seem to strike randomly, particularly hitting those who are the least likely to recover financially or mentally from the traumas they have to endure agian and again.

I sometimes wonder why I am spared from having to undergo such full-scale upheavals of my status quo of comfort and predictability. Nothing much has ever happened that can in any way rightfully be compared to what this 66-year old woman now has to envisage: the raw pain that most likely will dog her every effort to rebuild her life in a new location, with many of the physical ties to her past severed by loss of belongings. Losing plates and saucers are perhaps a matter of mere trifles in the bigger scheme of things, but when thes losses - as in this case- are so final and so comprehensive, they may even prove to be too much to bear.

Will it ever happen to me?

I may find myself in this woman's shoes some day. I cannot know in advance whether similar blows will come my way. If they do, then I certainly hope that I'll remember - whilst crying through the prolonged protests of deprivation - that whatever I lose here on earth will be restored or replaced in the second phase of my eternal walk. I do hope that the victims now emotionally numbed by this weeks extreme weather will hold on to the same idea. Scant comfort, perhaps, but comfort all the same.