Four years ago, today, I was standing in an office in Moto-azabu, Tokyo, when for a full minute, the world around me slipped beyond all semblance of control. I can recall, even now, the convulsions, the way they seemed to be building to a climax that never came, the way they grew ever stronger in an almost defiant manner, daring us to believe that it was going to end. The way the suspended light fixtures on the ceiling above me thrashed to and fro and seemed, at any second, poised to collapse along with the ceiling over our heads. Myself and the people that I was with at the time were spared from the most significant of the drama. But we knew, even standing without injury in the quake's aftermath, that something had changed. That this had been different. That something of undefinable impact had happened and it was only the magnitude of that something that was still in question. We would learn the magnitude soon enough.
For the next 6 hours or so, my companions and I were confined to the center of the city with intermittent power. Roads were closed, trains were derailed. Passage on foot was possible but Tokyo, perhaps more than any other city in the world, is predicated on the movement of machines. Getting "home" from wherever you are can take hours without them. We spent most of that day and evening in a flurry of communication - "where are you? are you okay? where is the closest shelter" became a form of greeting as we scrambled to coordinate movement in an infrastructure-less vacuum.
Though this in and of itself seemed a crisis, during that short period when we earnestly tried to make sense of reality, an entire region of human civilization was razed and plundered, more than 10,000 people who had been leading normal lives just hours earlier were now gone forever, and a city of 292,590 had been removed from the map - no longer fit for human habitat.
What I remember most about 3/11 is the sense that no matter how important, how essential, how overwhelming the tasks to which we devote ourselves, months, even years of effort, can be erased in an instant, faster than you can even process that it is indeed happening or not. All that remains afterward is loss. Lost time, lost potential, lost lives.
And what I have taken away from it, what I have willingly sought to mark down as a lesson of it all, is to not get too attached or too overwhelmed by the here and now. Everything we take for granted is a collective illusion, one that we proactively subscribe to, and one that we can unsubscribe to if we so wish. The soil beneath the ground on which we stand is not a matter of fact or a permanent fixture. It is there as the result of coincidence, centuries of convection caused by the collisions of plates which even now, still move.
But the concrete on which we walk is there only as the result of human will. Let us not forget that. We built this, everything. Nature can and likely will one day tear it down. It is not permanent. And because it is not permanent, it is neither insurmountable.
We built this world and we can unbuild it, we can make it worse, but we can also make it better. There is literally nothing that is so permanent that it is resistant to change. This applies on a macro and micro level, to our cities and nations, and to our families and daily lives. We are dreamers but it is a conscious dream that we control until nature deems it is time for us to wake up. Failure to build, failure to improve, is not due to natural law, but the absence of human will.
Eat, drink, love, sleep, live. This will all be over in the morning.
That is what I remember on this day...