Contrary to the busyness of most, my days are so spent in quietude and repose of routine that I have often complained about lacking the feverishness of excitement and exhilaration. There have been many an evening when I have waxed eloquent about the seeming emptiness of the dull hours that stretch before me like an empty road into the ever receding horizon. But lately I have had an encounter that has caused me to see more clearly as if scales have fallen off my eyes.
Recently I read an article in The Economist, “Wars Overlooked Victims” and it narrated the horrors of war like I had never heard it before. I was so sickened that I had to read something else to take those horrifying and deeply disturbing images from my mind (for words do paint a picture that is indelible). Here I was unable to stomach the mere reading about what is a reality for countless women, children and men.
I just turned our television set off after watching the news on BBC. Video footage of bleeding men and fire trucks rolling like a juggernaut on people. And I can't seem to silence the poignant plea of a man who says he just wants a better life. In the tired look of a bandaged young man; in the melancholic image of a woman leaving the refugee camp to get a pail of drinking water not really knowing if she would return without being hurt or much worse raped or killed, I see the longing for a day spent in quietude and the comfort of the restfulness of routine; Yes, even what I complained as emptiness.
I wish and pray that they have the luxury of what I glibly call boredom.
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1 comment:
I'm not a refugee nor a woman in fear of being starved, raped or killed anytime in the immediate future, but I long for the luxury of boredom too. Can't remember the last time I had that. Enjoy every moment of it Esterina, cause it seems to be an endangered species that has almost no hope of being revived once lost.
Truly, dizzy lizzy.
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