Skip to main content

How Am I Gonna Be An Optimist About This?

Over the weekend, I formed a slight addiction to this song by Bastille called "Pompeii."



And the walls kept tumbling down
In the city that we love
Great clouds roll over the hills
Bringing darkness from above

But if you close your eyes,
Does it almost feel like
Nothing changed at all?
And if you close your eyes,
Does it almost feel like
You've been here before?

How am I gonna be an optimist about this?
How am I gonna be an optimist about this?

---

I was on Twitter yesterday, and clicked through an image mere minutes after the Boston blasts. I don't know what I expected, exactly, but I hadn't been thinking blood. A lot of blood.

My friends were there. They left 20 minutes earlier, so they could beat the airport traffic.

I am training a new girl at work. She is wrapping up her degree from a Boston college and lives two blocks away. On Sunday, she went to take pictures of the finish line, went shopping at Marathon Sports. We saw these places on the TV screen. I teared up as I saw footage of a man pushing a wheelchair to the finish line moments after the explosion.

An eight year old boy was among the victims.

The song goes on:

Oh where do we begin?
The rubble or our sins?
Oh where do we begin?
The rubble or our sins?

---

Walking through my new neighbourhood on Saturday, I saw posters for a missing man. His face was cheerful, and he was described as having a "slight Irish accent." By Sunday, the posters had spread to my current neighbourhood. On Monday, they were everywhere I went. Each time I passed one, I thought, He is very loved. His people are looking for him. I felt the anxiety they must be in. I prayed they would find him safely.

Last night, his body was found in High Park.

How am I gonna be an optimist about this?

---

My coworker is going to a funeral today, for a friend who essentially died of a broken heart, driven into the ground after his wife died of cancer last year. They leave behind an eight six year old son.

Where do we begin?
The rubble or our sins?

---

Bomb blasts in Iraq and Somalia. Fighting in Syria. An earthquake in Iran.

There are days I want to close my eyes, curl up under a duvet, and wish these things could undo themselves.

But if you close your eyes,
Does it almost feel like
Nothing changed at all?


Labels:

Comments

  1. MLW11:35 AM

    A thought provoking blog. Good questions. Praise God He is our hope. We may not get answers but we can have hope.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Laura11:42 AM

    I know deeply the feeling of not being able to process tragedy. There are some stories,images and cries of anguish from my time in ICU that still haunt me. However, I can't get away from the idea and experience that our physical, temporal anguish is expressing something so much deeper and eternal. Yesterday, I found myself praying for the physicians and nurses and auxiliary staff at the trauma hospital that would have to treat all of those people. Their hearts and minds will never be the same but I don't necessarily think that's a bad thing. The tragedy becomes less tragic when we walk in and through the suffering in order to know Christ better because He walked in and through suffering on our behalf.

    I am especially heartbroken for your friend's, friend's son who is now an orphan. Somehow, I already know, that the Holy Spirit will make me mindful of him often.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Simone Weil: On "Forms of the Implicit Love of God"

Simone Weil time again! One of the essays in Waiting for God  is entitled "Forms of the Implicit Love of God." Her main argument is that before a soul has "direct contact" with God, there are three types of love that are implicitly  the love of God, though they seem to have a different explicit  object. That is, in loving X, you are really loving Y. (in this case, Y = God). As for the X of the equation, she lists: Love of neighbor  Love of the beauty of the world  Love of religious practices  and a special sidebar to Friendship “Each has the virtue of a sacrament,” she writes. Each of these loves is something to be respected, honoured, and understood both symbolically and concretely. On each page of this essay, I found myself underlining profound, challenging, and thought-provoking words. There's so much to consider that I've gone back several times, mulling it over and wondering how my life would look if I truly believed even half of these thi...
1 comment
Read more

I Like to Keep My Issues Drawn

It's Sunday night and I am multi-tasking. Paid some bills, catching up on free musical downloads from the past month, thinking about the mix-tape I need to make and planning my last assignment for writing class. Shortly, I will abandon the laptop to write my first draft by hand. But until then, I am thinking about music. This song played for me earlier this afternoon, as I attempted to nap. I woke up somewhere between 5 and 5:30 this morning, then lay in bed until 8 o'clock flipping sides and thinking about every part of my life that exists. It wasn't stressful, but it wasn't quite restful either...This past month, I have spent a lot of time rebuffing lies and refusing to believe that the inside of my heart and mind can never change. I feel like Florence + The Machine 's song "Shake it Out" captures many of these feelings & thoughts. (addendum: is the line "I like to keep my issues strong or drawn ?" Lyrics sites have it as "stro...
2 comments
Read more

Esse - Czeslaw Milosz

I'm on a bit of a poetry binge this week, and Monday afternoon found me lying on the luxurious shag rug of a friend's tiny apartment, re-reading some of my favourite poets (ee cummings, William Carlos Williams, Czeslaw Milosz). It is an adventure to re-open a collection and wonder what will pop out, knowing something you've read before will strike you afresh, or you will be reminded of a particularly moving line that you had somehow forgotten. Like this piece from Milosz, which floors me. Every. damn.* time. The first time I read it, I lay in a park with a friend (this same friend who offered me her rug as my reading burrow) and demanded that I share it with her. I spoke it carefully, and then, into the post-reading silence, I slammed the book shut, and dropped it as loudly as I could onto the grass. "I'm never reading anything again," I declared, "What else is there to say?" Esse I looked at that face, dumbfounded. The lights of métro st...
Post a Comment
Read more