We Must Rebuild

In the past hour I have watched pictures of the destruction of a continent, learned of a man's sudden and shocking death, and written a list about the multitude of imminent, really important things I've to do - write an article for the Phoenix Publishings blog, complete an English essay, have a passport photo taken. The three events are more than food for thought. They're force-feeding from the buffet table of Fate. There are two ways, it seems, of doing things in life - and I believe this applies everywhere - either you give in or you do not. From the simple things like getting up in the morning to achieving world peace, people and their actions are forever divided from one another into two groups - those who took risks and refused to stop working and those who succumbed to failure. I am not trying to criticise those who despair, those who stop, those who cannot go on. Because it can seem logical. But today, they do not seem logical. Today, the last day of January in a new year, they do not make sense. Today, as they say, fortune favours the brave. Today giving in is simply not an option. I look at society, at situations like Iraq and south-east Asia, and sometimes I laugh. I take the holier-than-thou approach, step back and think how futile it all is. We throw money at Indonesia and the surrounding area, constantly working in the knowledge that it will happen again. We stand out ground in Iraq, shooting anything that gives us a funny look, but we know that two insurgents step forward for every one killed. People see the goal and clutch at it, chasing the Sun over the ever-distant horizon. What is the point? The chances of succeeding, of putting a nation back on its feet, of securing world peace, of curing cancer, they are all hypothetical, and astronomically small anyway. Would it not be far easier to accept out helplessness and just cease bothering? But fortune favours the brave, I remind myself. It is too easy, too obvious to giveup. We must keep pushing for that goal because, futile or not, it is in our nature to try, to build, to progress. However far away the goals may seem, they are still there and we will never know how close we were, or how possiblt it really was, unless we try. Clutching at possibilities, chasing the end of the rainbow, that is why we are here. If you sit back and accept the futile weight of probability, it is only your life that becomes futile. We must rebuild, move on, develop simply because it is the only way we can ever construct a meaning out of life. But what do we build? And who might decide that? Who makes the decisions that impact your future? That's what we want to know, isn't it? Yes it is. But all the advice I can give here it to seek the answers yourself. Because the only person that can answer those questions is you.