Life in a global sense

Mind Moves: We have started this year with a lot of pain. It seems like the whole human race is in mourning. Globally, the tragedy of the tsunami swept us all off our feet. Our illusion of invulnerability was shattered and we sensed how vulnerable we are as a species.

The agony of the search and the dispiriting discovery of the body of Robert Houlihan brought tragedy even closer to our doorstep. We have all been caught up in mourning for this little boy and his family, as though we had each lost one of our own. Untimely death has so far been the dominant theme of 2005.

In his early 40s, the French poet Victor Hugo lost his daughter Leopoldine to drowning. She was about 20 years old. He suffered deeply and asked God why this should have happened to her, a tender flower just opening suddenly snatched away by a wave.

This personal tragedy sent him back to his birthplace, Villequier. In the poem At Villequier, he says: "Mankind can only see one side of reality. The other side is plunged in the darkness of a frightening mystery. Mankind bears the yoke without knowing why. Everything he sees is short-lived, futile and fleeting."

Utter incomprehension is our first reaction in times of severe and unexpected death. We look to God Himself for an explanation. We want to believe that order and justice are intrinsic to the universe. Some say that if we do not suffer, we cannot grow, and that therefore God wants us to mourn and suffer so we have a chance to grow.

There are people who can accept this kind of reasoning, but others can't and must look to others for help in constructing a rationale for terrible events. Conversations between us become our most frequent attempt to make sense and restore some coherent vision of meaning in a world that seems to be so cruel.

It is as though we are momentarily cast out of the Garden of Eden and aware for the first time just how fragile and alone we are. Why does death plague us in this way and why are some people taken away suddenly and shockingly, while some people get to live and carry on?

When someone we love dies, a part of us dies. When someone we see as just like us suffers in the way we have witnessed these past few weeks, a part of us suffers also. A tragedy of this proportion wakes us up to how deeply we are all connected. When we see that the suffering of others is also our own suffering, that their death is our death, we begin to see the emptiness of the notion of self that we usually cling to as our only means of holding on to a sense of personal identity.

Psychology encourages us to "find ourselves" and to "be ourselves", as though there was some "self" that could survive and thrive independent of the world around us. This "self" is a very limited creation of our own minds. It can take tragedies like those in Asia and Middleton to wake us up to the deeper truth that identity is an interpersonal and not merely an isolated, personal matter. We come alive in and through our relationships with others and in the manner in which we engage with the world around us. If we hold too rigidly to a limited notion of ourselves as separate, independent beings, there will always be something missing in our lives.

The tragedy of South-East Asia also wakes us up to the fact our life is deeply bound to the planet we inhabit. Our quality of life is shaped by the choices we make as to how we relate to the environment. The tsunami was like a cry from the heart of the earth, as it writhed in pain. This earth is critical to our survival and quality of life, but we have neglected it in so many ways. There is evidence of 18 per cent rise in carbon dioxide emissions in the past 20 years and if this trend continues, we will double this rate by 2100.

The conversations between us that these events, the tsunami and the Middleton tragedy, have provoked have brought us beyond the concerns for our own safety and into a deeper awareness of how intimately interconnected we are in this ever-smaller world we inhabit.

People are talking about God, global warming, the renewed sense of community, and the amazing displays of compassion across this country. One wonders what difference it might make, if we could keep alive this awareness of our interdependence, to the choices we routinely make every day. For one thing, we might begin to see other people, and the environment, not as some arbitrary backdrop against which we live out our all-important destinies, but as an intrinsic part of the adventure that constitutes our life.