I took a long walk New Year's Day.
With so many things to think about this last year...the one thing that kept coming back to me was the thought of all those lost in the recent Tsunami in South Asia...and those who survive and grieve in the ruins.
The images relayed to us from Aceh, from Phuket, from Sri Lanka, from Tamil Nadu were so strong, so startling...the grief and loss so overwhelming and complete...families playing on the beach, children unaware that the ocean was about to rise, and then, of course, the ocean did rise with brutal and unmerciful force...
There really aren't words...only questions and half-formed prayers....and, now, donations to be made. But reflecting on this as I strolled got me thinking about how the simplest things are the most profound. The greatest tragedies tell us the most, and speak to something at the core.
They didn't know.
There's something about politics and opinion. We often speak as if we are so sure. We have to. No one would listen to us otherwise.
Truth be told, however, there's much that none of us know...that comes from out of the blue...that falls outside the region of our expertise or expectations however predictable in retrospect it might be....whether it's a natural disaster or an accident...or man's inhumanity to man like Rwanda, Darfur or the shock of 9/11....or something more mundane like...a surprising political result.
The Tsunami was an act of nature. The result of the sudden movement of plates of the earth under the ocean. It was no one's fault and completely unpredictable. But how much could have been done...how many lives could have been saved with better preparedness and an early warning system? Surely, tens of thousands; frankly, we will never know.
And for now, that's not the focus. For now, we count the dead and attempt to care for the living and understand the magnitude of the necessary relief effort.
There is so much we don't know. And that ignorance forms the framework of the hardest part of our human existence. Whether we think of it or not...each of us knows somewhere inside ourselves that each departure we share with someone we love may be the last...even a joyful day at the beach might turn, in a moment, into a day of sorrow.
As I walked on New Year's Day it sunk in, however, that this grim lack of knowledge, this ignorance and lack of power also highlights our greatest responsibility.
We must take action, we must live our lives based on what we do know. We must make sure that our candle burns bright and shines the powerful light of our convictions, and our hard-won wisdom, in the darkness.
A corollary of this is that those with the most power and knowledge...have a great responsibility to protect those who don't or can't know.
And yet, how often is it that those with most power, our leaders...haven't been made to see what those on the outside can see plain as day? As tragic as what we humans don't know....a greater tragedy still is what we should have or could have known...
and, more powerful yet, what we knew and yet chose to ignore.