It’s normally around this time of year that ‘WE’ the fragile multitudes stare at the tattered, weeping remnants of our New Year’s resolutions and start feeling all shitty and normal again. Nothing is more personally deflating than the knowledge that owning a brand new shiny gym membership card is as close as you’re ever going to get to the actual gym. Now it’s costing you thirty five quid a month to feel fat and hate yourself. Well done. Smoking again as well? Great. How’s that guilt working out for you? Get the vodka out and we’ll just pretend it’s still last year then.
I say this normally happens because 2010 was a little different. Just as we were all poised to dive into our cesspits of despair and self-loathing Haiti went and had an earthquake, killing tens of thousands of people and creating a humanitarian disaster for thousands more. I often find it’s a bit difficult to grumble about lack of exercise when loads of people are dead. Locked to the News we watched aghast as their plight and misery proved so terrible and moving that it reverberated around the world and temporarily mobilised many powerful nations to actually work together and help people. Like we’re all part of one planet or something. I love it when they remember to do that.
Today, however, brought a snippet of joy and hope that I found so immediately heart warming I had to share it with anyone who gets lost on the internet and accidentally wanders onto my site.
A large search and rescue party, comprised of many of New York’s finest firemen, pull an eight year old boy and his ten year old sister out of their flattened home, SEVEN days after the quake. Alive and well after a week under tonnes of pulverised concrete, in the dark with no food and presumably only trickling rain water to drink. As they pull the boy out, he raises his hands in the air like he’s just won the Oscar for the ‘best reaction to being pulled out of the jaws of death’ category – to an enormous cheer from the crowd. What an absolute legend. He looks like he’s going “Ta-Daaaaaa!!! And for my next trick I’ll survive a volcanic eruption!”
I think in truth he spots his Mum in the rescue party and goes for a hug only to be pulled away to safety, but what a moment of outstanding elation in the midst of all that awful desperation. The indomitable human spirit wins through again.
So with that new perspective in mind throw away your gym card and make the only resolution you stick to the one about being alive and happy.
May it be so.
wow! that’s the best thing i’ve seen in ages. cheers chris!
And he even thinks to pull his little pants up. Every time I see it I fall more and more in love with him as only a mother could with her child. Very, very powerful feeling when you consider I can’t stand other people’s kids!