Life sometimes hurt but...

Recently there were two news items that was quite meaningful and emotional for me. Interestingly enough, one was on NPR and the other on mainstream TV news. Different venues but both had a strong impact on me.

Firstly, NPR did considerable coverage on the China earthquake. It was just by chance that the two hosts of “All Things Considered”, Melissa Block and Robert Segal, happen to be in Schizwan to do some reporting on China other then Beijing or Shanghai. You could say that were in the right place at the right time…if you were reporters…otherwise… There were many hours of reporting, but there was one particular story that stood out. You can catch it on the web if you want to hear it for yourself. You should, because it is a raw display of human emotions that will move you. In one segment Melissa Block is doing the commentary. Her story fallows a distraught couple who is trying to find help to locate their missing parents and young child. Their home has been destroyed, and there is a strong possibility that their love ones are under the rubble. Somehow they are able to get a heavy piece of equipment to help them, and sadly enough it locates the missing people. They are all dead. The crying goes right to your heart. They are speaking Chinese, but the audible grief is international. The real story for me was after. On another NPR show Melissa was talking about the same incident and said that after a while the couple stopped their wailing and pulled themselves together. They didn’t have the luxury to entertain their grief; they had work to do. They had to find a crematorium that was willing to take their parents and son. Due to the large number of deaths, it was not always possible to get a cremation, but they succeeded. They did what they had to do. Can we all do the same if we were in the same situation? I should hope that we can, although I pray that I am never in that same situation or anything comparable.

The second story was a report on seriously ill children missing their proms and the hospital giving a substitute for the children of all ages. Nice story, warm, touching, but here again the message came later in the form of an email that came into the station the next day. To paraphrase, “It’s not waiting for the storm to pass. It’s learning how to dance in the rain.” Wow, someone should have said that line to me a long time ago. I kept waiting for the storm to pass, the sun to come out which is a dumb thing to do living in San Francisco. But the real point is not waiting for the storm to pass. Many times it will not. Your health will not improve, your job gone for good, your loved one taken away by the cruel hand of death, and on and on. There are many storms out there, and they will not all move out of the area. We will have to live with some of them, so get out your dancing shoes, and have a good time. That’s all we have, time, and there’s only a finite amount of that.

So with fortitude and the right frame of mind, you can make it, get through anything. Just keep dancing. Do the bop, the mambo, the salsa, whatevah even if it’s pouring, storming, snowing. Don’t stop; keep dancing.