Life, one day at a time

Life, one day at a time
By Cheong Suk-Wai (ST/25/05/08)

As messages go, the e-mail I got from a Myanmar friend two days after Cyclone Nargis blitzed his blighted land was as stark as they come.
His missive comprised four images, all in colour.
Here, boys and girls floated face down in a muddy river. Here and here, mothers and fathers died clutching their children to their hearts. And here, a headless torso was caught between the branches of a tree. (I guess he saved the worst for last.)
Not one word accompanied these, but then no words were needed. His indictment of me was clear.
He had first e-mailed me soon after the cyclone hit, appealing for aid by linking me to a few Myanmar websites that streamed news of the disaster's latest horrors. He did not send me pictures then.
Now, he could not have known that I had not responded to that cry for help because I was on medical leave and had not been checking my office e-mail as regularly as I usually do.
So I suppose he had assumed that I was another one of the many who cocoon themselves in 'no-see, no-hear, no-tell' shells against the senselessness of this violent, new century.
Then came the Sichuan earthquake.
I found the little voice in me piping up: 'What is a life?'
It had piped up with that very question a week after I came through from rush-rush surgery four months ago.
Madly glad as I was for a second crack at living better, I strained for an answer then, as I do now. What, indeed, is a life?
What is a life to each survivor of Nargis, who has just stubs of potato and onion to live on indefinitely?
What is a life to the 60-year-old woman who, last Wednesday, was pulled out alive, after eight days, from rubble that has buried her past, present and future?
What is a life to the farmers on France's Somme River today, who tend Europe's largest wheat fields, lush-green swathes whose soil was soaked with the blood of more than a million soldiers in 1916?
In her 1934 novel Voyage In The Dark, the Welsh ex-chorus girl Jean Rhys had one of her male characters musing on our funny old world in which 'a girl's clothes cost more than the girl inside it'. A dim view, yes, but when more than 90,000 people in Asia return to dust within 14 days, life does seem cheap.
Perhaps I am looking at it the wrong way around.
A task, for instance, may be hard, but once you accept that it is hard, then suffering loses its sting, and you just get on with it.
In the same way, I think, it is only when one accepts that birth, death and all the bumps and burps in between mean essentially nothing in the fullness of time that one is truly freed to begin casting the risk-shy ego aside and invest one's life with meaning.
To love living while accepting the slings it brings also writes off the deadweight debts to self we incur every day from anger, guilt and pride.
Over falafel and olives with a university mate last weekend, she got around to telling me why, after seven years, she and her husband were going to have a second child.
In the happy haze of young motherhood, she used to think one child was quite enough. 'I had been fortunate to experience pregnancy but I wasn't so in love with being pregnant that I would do it over and over again.'
She reckoned without Baby No. 1 clamouring for a companion, though. Thus does love make meaningful again even that which has somehow been rendered meaningless.
Like the anecdotal hermit, I still have no answer as to what a life is because, really, none is needed.
I look around me, thank God that I can still see, sniff, touch, hear and talk. And what a joy it is just to be.
suk@sph.com.sg

"For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?"

(Mark 8:36)