You're floating on a still lake and suddenly a boulder falls from a great height, right next to you. The concussion leaves you gasping as the huge wave rolls over you, but you hardly know what's happening as you're thrown back. You sputter and blink and furiously paddle in some direction you think is away from the danger, but how do you know?
The gut reaction is instinctive, but how do you process the rest? How many days do you wonder what just happened, what other people saw, what you could have done to prevent it or minimize damage?
Or maybe the wave that hit you wasn't the first horrible concussion, but the next ripple out? You weren't exactly there. You didn't quite see it. But you know someone who did, and you know that what's awful for you must be worse for them.
But you don't know how awful it is, just that you can't stop thinking about it, that its impact will never leave you, that all you can do is just wish you could take the pain from someone less able to handle it and shoulder the burden for them.
You don't get to pick and choose. You just have to go on, ducking your head when a curious outsider wants to know "what it was like" or whether you feel more strongly or less strongly that boulders should be given access to gravity and allowed to drop into lakes like that. Leaving your sunglasses on when you go in the store so no one can see that even though you weren't there, even though someone you love wasn't under the boulder when it dropped, you still hurt. Getting calls from those on the shore and having to hold back tears every time because you know there was somebody's somebody under the boulder as it fell, and you're reminded that the boulder fell on purpose even if it didn't fall on your somebody.
No, boulders shouldn't be able to drop into lakes like that. But sometimes they do anyway, without much warning and without consideration for the ripples they might inflict on the innocent. You watch the ripples fan out farther and farther until they reach the banks of the lake, where they just echo and echo and echo, inviting pointless speculation and commentary on where they might have originated and why.
You stand there watching the spectators, hearing all the noise and nonsense, and you just want to scream, "you don't know! You don't know what it means, what it has cost us in the middle of the lake!"
But what's the point? If you tell them, what would it matter? Every community with a story like this has to weather it alone. If they're lucky, like we are, they'll be supported by others who have the same story and had to watch the effects of a boulder dropping into their own quiet lake.
No, if you haven't been there and experienced the fallout close at hand, you just can't know. But for those of us who have--if we're wise--we'll let the experience flow over us and become part of us, and find a new compassion for the humanity around us.
Because we can't ignore it, we can't pretend it didn't happen, and we can't justify it happening to anyone, ever. It's horrible. It didn't happen for a good reason. But it happened to us. We have to own it.
God knows we can't experience everything, and couldn't handle it if we did. But we can choose to feel it, to embrace it, to own it, so that when it happens to someone else we can find that connection in grief that allows us to feel it with them, share the load, and help them know they are not alone. If we can find connection or meaning in the suffering, then we have done something.
Most of us just outside the drop zone can't do much, but we can do that. And that's enough.
