A wish for peace in 2005

The death toll from the tsunamis has now reached 125,000. When we hear of people suffering so much elsewhere, it makes our comfort at home seem somehow indecent or self-absorbed in contrast, and the everyday troubles we complain of mere trifles.

Oddly enough, a couple of years before my husband and I moved where we live now, I used to occasionally dream about tidal waves hitting a coast and us just barely escaping. I never knew why I dreamed this, but shortly after moving here, regrettably farther from the ocean than where we lived before, we consoled ourselves with the thought that if a tidal wave ever struck we’d be safer here, inland on a hillside. It seemed just a silly paranoia at the time. When a former coworker first visited California from Florida, he remarked how he worried about earthquakes here, and I replied in disbelief, “But you have hurricanes.” I considered hurricanes a more immediate and obvious danger. Recent events remind us how quickly one’s fortune can change, how something that seems silly one moment can be what tears lives apart in the next.

This year the world has suffered war, terrorism, volcanoes, hurricanes, earthquakes and tsunamis. There have been individual, personal tragedies that we never hear about in the news, but which hurt every bit as much. No doubt each of us knows someone who lost a loved one or suffered a major setback.

Many good things have also happened this year, but these recent deaths in Asia make them difficult to remember, and any attempt to do so threatens to minimize the importance of the 125,000 or more lost lives. The number of deaths from this one event seems incomprehensible.

My heart goes out to those who’ve been injured or lost loved ones, in any one of these disasters, great or small, anywhere this year. All most of us may be able to do is give what we can from a distance, embrace those close to us, hope for a rapid recovery for the suffering, and pray for more peace next year, from both man and nature.

So I wish for you all more peace in 2005, for the good events in your lives to outweigh the bad, for relief to those who suffer now. Life is precious.