I will start with an aside… today, on the online radio show “One Minute How To”, an interview with me was posted. It is all about the creative process that I touched on yesterday!
So, back to today’s piece, in 1923 an earthquake knocked this building (Ryounkaku) down. It had been the first western style skyscraper to exist in Japan. This is a photo of it in its partially disheveled form prior to complete collapse. I know that collapse and, even the lives that were lost at the time, can seem completely irrelevant to us now, but do you consider how history would be shaped differently if natural disasters did not occur? (If one stretches this thinking to the extreme, life on our planet would probably be in entirely different forms considering the millions of natural disasters that have occurred over the course of biological evolution… but that is a different blog for a different day).
I find myself thinking about Haiti a great deal. Will time efface what has just happened? Has time already diminished the emotional impact that it strikes in you? Should we aim at constant awareness of the suffering that is occurring or focus on the ways that the events that occur every second will reconstruct both the past and the future. What do you think?