Disasters, Individual: What To Do?
In early September, outside on a beautiful day, I was struck by a pickup truck, which then left the scene. An eyewitness stopped and called 911. Paramedics placed me in a neck brace and a stretcher for transport to the nearest ER. I could not move my back and had deep pain. A more than frightening day.
A year ago, I wrote here about disasters—natural ones like hurricanes and also individual like personal losses. I did not imagine a year later that I might contemplate a life of literally arrested dreams and hopes. The way family and friends—especially family—stepped up in my moment of need motivated me to deeply consider our individual disasters, returning to those year-ago thoughts.
Writing about the natural and individual disasters then in dialogue with Zora Neale Hurston‘s Their Eyes Were Watching God, I reflected on both Janie‘s eventual personal liberation and on the wider context of that liberation. Janie shed communities of people, the bad ones voluntarily and good involuntarily as a result of natural disaster. She finds herself. But liberation in solace, after tragedy is only part of the story. I wrote:
“Yet to what extent is [a] hopeful interpretation of solace after tragedy at odds with investing in community? At the end, in the very last lines, Hurston is calling her soul, which was in solace, to see that horizon she has gathered. In that horizon the people in her life are present. They are a part of it. Query whether we can strive to have found that independent and free strength living for ourselves, but then enter from a place of strength to engage and (re)build with others, under that big horizon. Even after catastrophe.”
Reflecting in convalescence, I considered that the driver had left the scene. Fortunately, only leaving me with a couple months’ recovery, though I might have been permanently incapacitated by a large pickup truck. Friends and family were angry and upset on my behalf and commented on what that must mean about other people, and for my trust in the world.
I think the same I thought before: In this world, yes, we have to learn to find ourselves. We maybe never fully do, but once we are in the vicinity, it is definitely (past?) time to turn to engaging and building with others.
Even the act of being out in the world exposes us to risk, to disappointment, and to grief. That can come from an unexpected impact from a pickup truck, for too many of us from a bullet, from an infectious disease, or from a friendship or relationship loss that breaks us. Each time we thought the chance was low.
A year more, and this painful experience behind, I continue to believe the horizon Hurston wrote about encompasses those other people in our place and time. And it involves an attempt to go into the world and offer to do the best that we can --to pull the pieces together --and make our communities and our country better.
Maybe it’s a new childcare initiative, or a downtown renovation that brings beauty and smiling on a Friday night, or helping people who are down and out have a place to rest their heads at night. All of these efforts necessarily require working with other people, trying to find that solidarity, even when we don’t agree and don’t even like to spend time with others in our community.
Rebuilding takes many forms and two things are true: we all have varied abilities; and we will not meet our expectations or those of others—we will fail in that.
Offering of ourselves to others, to be part of the building something up together, is making ourselves vulnerable. Gathering in the horizon is not riding off into the sunset. It does not yield only a happy ending. It is the risk and disappointment, and even as I write this, and even as a person who knows himself and considers himself ‘strong’, I feel disappointed about myself and about the world.
Nevertheless, I will keep engaging and building. I still believe it is the essential thing I can do. I am thankful to have that while still on this imperfect earth.
For you reader, if you’re reading this, you are likely someone who tries to offer yourself to bring people together. Keep it up.