Happiness and despair

This crazy summer I’m starting to feel a little schizophrenic - burdened with minute by minute awareness of insurrection, immense natural disasters and now nuclear meltdown, while simultaneously enjoying a truly lucky life.

I can remember as an undergraduate in the seventies, the fear we had of the nuclear conflagration.  And in the last ten days, this nightmare seems to be coming true.

Not that this hasn’t happened before – Chernobyl, Three Mile Island – but coming combined with earthquake and tsunami and in a long line of devastating world events, it feels as though the end of days has arrived.

The way we learned of the catastrophe in Japan at our place was something that could only have happened in the 21^st century. My husband and I were reading in bed when our youngest came in to ask if we’d heard about the tsunami.

We followed her out to the living room where she was skyping her oldest brother in Scotland. He had told her about the earthquake in Japan. On the computer screen, we had him in one corner, grave and beanie-clad, commentating from his flat in Glasgow. In the other corner we had live footage from Sendai.

The juxtaposition of the filthy, wreckage-strewn water destroying everything in its path, with my own kid, half a world away but looking safe and healthy, was almost too much to take in. It took me a long time to get to sleep that night.

This happens so often it does my head in. I read the paper every morning. My heart goes out to the thousands of people whose lives have been shattered in Japan, New Zealand, Brazil, Pakistan, not to mention Libya and other countries where the political situation is dire. I send money, I talk about them in grave tones, I pray. I feel the very least I can do is be respectful enough to preface everything I say with, ‘Shall we spend two minutes silence thinking of our sisters and brothers in Japan’. It seems thoughtless to start any conversation without acknowledging how fortunate I am.

Because in my little life in this corner of the world, I am very happy most of the time. This is as it should be, given that I am not being threatened by nuclear radiation, earthquake, flood or fire, my kids are unlikely to be ‘disappeared’ by sinister security forces or die of a preventable disease, I have clean water and food, books to read and an internet connection.

It feels all wrong though, my full, happy heart on a morning when I’ve just read about the Fukushima power station. Overriding my horror is gratitude that my second son has reached Scotland safely, and that when I talked to him on the phone he was surrounded by two generations of family.

That seems to be the way of life in this time and place. Like many others, I have a constant awareness – a kind of backdrop, a cloud over the sun – of the way the world seems to be going to hell in a hand basket and no one who has any authority seems to give a toss. Alongside that is a heightened sense of joy at the good and simple things that are mine.

On the recent long weekend, we drove to the northeast to stay with our oldest daughter and her partner in their little patch of paradise outside Beechworth. We slept in their old farm house, walked in the deep bush of the state forest that backs onto their place, swam in the silky water of their dam alongside a brood of new ducklings, visited the outdoor dunny in black nights filled with stars.

The air was pristine; we picked apples off a wild tree behind their house, brewed coffee and sat on the long verandah reading weekend papers full of grief and horror.

There’s not much I can do about this coexisting of deep contentment with despair. I know it’s a privileged problem to have and one that will continue if I am lucky enough to escape searing tragedy myself. My head is full of the grief and brutality of the world, my spirit is oppressed by it. And my heart is happy because today, all the people I love most are happy, and know themselves loved.