Manchester
Manchester.
I woke up early on Tuesday morning, turned on my phone and read about the devastating attack that had taken place the night before. At first; and it makes me feel sick to admit it; I felt nothing, actually. I thought about the frequency at which we've been hearing these kind of stories over the past few years, and I thought about how I needed to get out of bed and get ready for work, and how feeling sad and worried about it would slow me down. So, for the time being, I swept it under the rug of my consciousness and went about my day.
But from the moment I got to work, I felt off. I couldn't help but think about those innocent people, and especially the young children. The thoughts kept popping up like Jack-in-the-boxes, taking me by surprise, and trying to drag me back inside the box with them into a dark place I just wasn't prepared to go. I needed to process what had happened, but I just didn't know how. Trying to forget about it and get on with my day just wasn't working for me. I remember looking around at my colleagues and thinking, how do we do it? How do we just go about our normal lives when there are innocent people dying every day, and people willing to do such evil things? How can we laugh when people are grieving, make jokes when people have nothing left to live for? How can we just go about doing what we do, enjoying life, when others have been robbed of it?
The thing is, I think that's exactly what we need to do. When we hear about these attacks happening right, left and centre, and how these terrorists are managing to worm their way into people's every-day lives and disrupt it from its very core, it could easily create mass hysteria. I think that's what they want. They want us to be too scared to go to Paris or London anymore, or to use the underground, or to go to football matches or concerts. They want us to be frightened to publish and express what's on our hearts and our minds (as demonstrated by the attack on Charlie Hebdo). They want to slowly chip away at our freedom by playing on our fear, because that's exactly what fear does. It constricts us and makes us unable to live life to its fullest. So the way we get back? We live life. We do all the things we're afraid to do, and more.
Yes, we grieve the loss. The terrible, inhumane, heart-wrenching loss of innocent lives. We stand beside those who are hurting and hold their hands. We can do that through making donations to trustworthy charities involved in helping those affected by these terrible tragedies, or we can do that by simply offering up our most heart-felt thoughts and prayers. But we will not help anybody by dwelling obsessively on what has happened, and by retreating into fear and depression. More than ever, we need to stand up and do LOVE. Love is the opposite of fear. Loving actions consist of the small things, as well as the bigger things. They include smiling at the stranger on the bus on the street, complimenting the waitress on her beautiful hair, and by giving more than you get. A loving action can be choosing to be the first one to bridge the silence in a particular friendship, or making a cup of tea for your partner even when he's pissed you off, or by telling your colleague you'll clean their dishes for them or take their tray back to the canteen because they've got a headache and a lot on their plate (no pun intended).
Bigger loving actions are forgiving people who have wronged us, even when we don't think they deserve our forgiveness. They include doing our best to silence our selfishness and our ego in a self-centred world, and to look inside ourselves and repair the wounds that we have suffered along life's way, so that what we give back is a whole, complete version of ourselves and not just a shade of ourselves overshadowed by our insecurities and bad reactions.
I also think that we can do love by making art. Art, in all its forms, has the ability to touch people in the deepest places of their soul and take them out of their worries and sorrows, albeit for a split second. We all know the benefit of losing to a beautiful song or piece of music at just the right moment, or of seeing that picture that truly captures how we're feeling, or of reading that story that engrosses us and lifts our spirits. And that film that has us weeping buckets of tears? That's art, too. So is dancing. Singing, baking, cooking, making, creating, expressing. Art is so fundamental to our emotional and spiritual health. We need art. After all, we are art, and we are connected to all that is.
I didn't start to feel better after hearing the news on Tuesday morning until I shut the door, put away my phone, laid out my makeshift painting work-surface and began to paint. And the weight didn't truly lift until we had a minute's silence for the Manchester attack at work, where I was able to shut my eyes, truly bring all the pain to the surface of my consciousness, and shed a tear. It was a silent, quiet tear, but a tear all the less. Our tears are like healing balm and when we embrace them, without making them wrong or a sign of weakness, we are able to shed some of the dark layers that we let settle over our hearts to protect them. Then the light is able to find its way back inside, and we suddenly feel like we have come back to ourselves. Home.
There's no answer and no quick fix to the suffering caused by these terrorist attacks. It's easy to label the terrorists as bad, and everyone else as good, and to forget that we're all just human trying to negotiate our way through a messy existence. It's easy to think about retaliating with bombs and walls and visas. It's tempting to want to keep all those we love locked up at home, away from the risk of losing them. Harder is the choice to live life to the full, to repay acts of fear with acts of love, and to dance and laugh in the eye of the storm.
I dedicate this article to all those who have lost their lives in the Manchester attack of 22.05.2017, to all those who have lost loved ones as a result of this attack, and to a
ll those struggling to process this atrocity.