Miracle. All of it.

~ Live & Learn

face-paint-powder-red

Picture yourself in an airliner, at high altitude. One of the plane engines has just caught fire, the other doesn’t look very well either, and the pilot has to make an emergency landing. Finding yourself in such a situation can be a shattering, yet also a revealing experience. First, there are of course the cries, the tears, the whispered prayers, the loud hysterics. Amid all the wailing and gnashing of teeth, you cannot think of anything in any detached, rational fashion. For you have to admit it, you are scared to death, just like everyone else. Yet the plane lands safely and everybody gets off unharmed. After you’ve had a chance to pull yourself together, you start thinking a bit more clearly about what just happened.

That’s when we might realise, for example, how close we can be sometimes to not being at all. And also that there is something oppressively materialistic, to an almost obscene degree, in any ‘brush with death’. Some faulty piece of equipment – a worn-out part, a loose screw, a leaking pipe, anything – could be enough to do us in. That’s all it takes. We thus realise that, when we experience failure, we start seeing the cracks in the fabric of existence, and the nothingness that stares at us from the other side. Yet even as failure pushes us towards the margins of existence it gives us the chance to look at everything – at the world, at ourselves, at what we value most – with fresh eyes. The failure of things, coming as it does with a certain measure of existential threat, exposes us for what we are. And what a sight!

From that unique location – the site of devastation that we’ve become – we understand that we are no grander than the rest of the world. Indeed, we are less than most things. The smallest stone we pick up randomly from a riverbed has long preceded us, and will outlive us. Humans are barely existing entities: how can we claim privileges? Fundamentally, we are vulnerable, fragile creatures. And if, unlike the rest of existence, people are endowed with reason, it is this gift of reason that should lead us to understand how modest our place in the cosmos actually is.

~ Costica Bradatan, Everyone fails, but only the wise find humility

Notes:

26 thoughts on “Miracle. All of it.”

  1. Humility, yes..gratitude, without question…the miraculous serendipity of us being here at all…it shouldn’t take a near catastrophe for us to pause and whisper ‘wow, thank you’…

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  7. My father was in a military plane crash, the plane landed in the soft sand and the plane broke in half, my father being in the Air Force (career man) was in planes, all the time and I wonder if he was uneasy when he had to continue being on the planes (these was decades before I was born and I found a little newspaper clipping in my mothers strong box after the divorce and she confirmed that yes, he was in that plane, of course I was in trouble for snooping …a man at church and his father and another man were in a small plane that went down, injured yes, lost yes and they all lived, a man that owns a local store I frequent was in a very bad light plane crash and he and the others waited injured for days until they were found, he went white when he told me this, he said he trusted God, accepting that his life was in the hands of God, Always!… before we knew her, one of my daughter’s teacher was in a terrible commercial plane one of the later Boeing 700’s series, it went down in a residential neighborhood, the impact, fire, the homes destroyed, the personal devastation took it toll, the hero’s that emerged…she was injured and so thankful she survived…I was a teen when that plane went down, in the city were I was living, I remember crossing over the freeway on my way to the on ramp and seeing ambulance, after ambulance for miles coming inbound from the outlying areas…at the time I had no clue what had happened…I soon found out when I arrived at my destination, of the accident…I am so thankful all of those I know survived to go on and positively influence so many lives…I can’t know what was going on in each of their minds but I do know that they all appreciated the gift of life, more, after living through such difficult moments…and we all should recognize the strength that these people drew from and be thankful for each breath we take as each breath is a gift…

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  9. One of my first memories of being on a plane is when I looked out the window and saw fire. I was only about five years old. It’s been a long time since I’ve thought about it. My mother told me much later that we were on our way back to the States from England and one of the plane’s engines caught fire. An emergency landing was made in the Virgin Islands. Anyway, yes, “humans are vulnerable, fragile creatures”…and in an instant our lives can be over.

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  10. This is a situation where childhood PTSD can be a good thing – it causes me to go into a numb zone where I function quite rationally, if detachedly. There’s time to fall apart later. But yes, point taken, “Fundamentally, we are vulnerable, fragile creatures” – amen. I often wonder how humans make it into maturity, I truly do. Some uncanny instinct we largely pay no attention to, until we do. Aloha, David.

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  12. I got here this morning through today’s post on “Miracle. All of it.”

    It’s incredible how the Einstein quote of this post fits your post of this morning, and probably pretty much every post in this series. Thanks for this …

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