Friday, October 09, 2009

The High Ground

It has been a tough week. One where I can't sleep properly at night and nothing seems to go right at work and if I don't scream in the car on the way home then I shout at Riley when I open the door. Not good. Blah blah blah, right?! We've all been there.

Somewhere I haven't been, thank the deities, is shivering under a piece of tarp while some well-fed guy in chinos talks to a black box about how my village/town/city just got totally erased off the face of the planet by a wave, a quake, a fire, a mudslide, a flood or a typhoon. I haven't been sitting there in shock with every single thing I used to use in my day to day life needing to be replaced from stocks that just don't exist, there's no clean water, or food, and I'd rather think about any of that than the death I saw and only just missed out on myself.

Turning on the news this week has really put my petty concerns into perspective. Which is to say, they are trivial. It is something about Australia that I have taken for granted my whole life - we live inside the boundaries of a tectonic plate. While we drift NNE and enjoy our generally placid lives, the edges of this plate scrape and gouge their way along our neighbours' and sometimes this is the result - quakes that lead to tsunamis. Just to make you feel inadequate it can all happen during typhoon season to give that added tropical sense of Armageddon by puring pelting rain that stings as it slaps you.

No matter what problems I have this week, I'm grateful to be in the position of being able to help some people who have got a much rougher end of a much larger pineapple this week.

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