Ramblings
A woman I work with here giddily told me today that she is pregnant. She has not told anyone else in the office other than her direct boss, who is just such a ridiculously awesome person there are no words to describe her. Anyways, she is really happy, obviously, and she doesn’t care that she has only been here since May this year, so that made me feel better about my situation. I know it shouldn’t matter and I should just snap right out of that worker-bee drone like mentality if I feel like the corporation is more important than my future children, but still. I guess I am still clinging to that dream I had of getting into this business and rising to the top, or close to it, and living the life of a fabulous editor-in-chief. Not to say this could never happen, but who am I kidding? I want this baby, and I want more of them after him/her. This means that I will be stalling my career and probably will not be able to put in the time required to get to the top the way I wanted to. I have mixed feelings about this sometimes. I imagine that many women do.
The other night I was watching 60 Minutes and one of the stories was about a small group of Tutsi women in Rwanda that narrowly escaped being raped and then hacked to death by the rusty machetes of the Hutus. These women hid in a priest’s home, in a tiny bathroom for something like 3 months. All of them survived, but are deeply scarred by the experience. They have gone on to live back in their villages, after having lost their families, side by side with the murderous Hutus. One woman, who lost her father, mother and two brothers, was able to meet with and forgive the man that slaughtered her family. When the interviewer asked her how she could forgive such a person, she talked about not wanting to poison her heart further with rage and the need for vengeance.
When I think about all the little worries I have, in particular the one with my unborn child and my career, and I compare it to the experiences of a woman like that, I feel very small. And I am. All of us are. I still have to live my life and experience my experiences, but I am beginning to see things from a different perspective now. To me, this new view is the difference between being anthropomorphic and seeing nature for what it is and how it presents itself to us. I watched that movie about the guy who goes to live with grizzly bears every summer. In the end, he and his girlfriend are killed and eaten by one of the bears that they live with. The bush pilot that picks them up and drops them off every year was the one who found them, or what was left of them. The narrator of the story, someone famous but I can’t remember the name right now, philosophizes as the camera slowly zooms in on the eyes of one of the grizzlies that the man and his girlfriend lived with: he says something along the lines of not understanding what the dead man saw in the eyes of the bears, about how the man romanticized the animals and placed his own emotions on them, creating a false one-sided bond with the beasts. The narrator muses that what he sees in the eyes of this bear is nothing more than the cold, clear gaze of nature; emotionless and unapologetic.
This is how I have begun to see things. How you end up in a first world country in front of a plasma TV in your heated house and how you end up in a tiny bathroom somewhere in a war-torn third world country on the wrong end of genocide hiding for your life is not a matter of luck, of god or whatever; it is what it is. I don’t believe in a balance of good and evil anymore. I don’t believe that there is a philosophical or spiritual reason why I miscarried my first child, it didn’t happen to teach me anything, it happened because there was a mistake in the code and my body (thankfully) did what it had to do. Something about the absence of reason and emotion in the universe is oddly comforting to me. Things that happen on this planet still make me sad and angry and wish that all the people doing all the harm would be destroyed, but in moments when I don’t think about those things I find peace in the amazing things that happen in nature.
So when I started worrying today after talking to my coworker that this baby in me isn’t going to make it, I stopped and asked myself “What if then? What will I do?” and the answer is that there is nothing I can do.
Nothing is predestined.
The future does not exist yet, and nature does not have a grudge against me.
The other night I was watching 60 Minutes and one of the stories was about a small group of Tutsi women in Rwanda that narrowly escaped being raped and then hacked to death by the rusty machetes of the Hutus. These women hid in a priest’s home, in a tiny bathroom for something like 3 months. All of them survived, but are deeply scarred by the experience. They have gone on to live back in their villages, after having lost their families, side by side with the murderous Hutus. One woman, who lost her father, mother and two brothers, was able to meet with and forgive the man that slaughtered her family. When the interviewer asked her how she could forgive such a person, she talked about not wanting to poison her heart further with rage and the need for vengeance.
When I think about all the little worries I have, in particular the one with my unborn child and my career, and I compare it to the experiences of a woman like that, I feel very small. And I am. All of us are. I still have to live my life and experience my experiences, but I am beginning to see things from a different perspective now. To me, this new view is the difference between being anthropomorphic and seeing nature for what it is and how it presents itself to us. I watched that movie about the guy who goes to live with grizzly bears every summer. In the end, he and his girlfriend are killed and eaten by one of the bears that they live with. The bush pilot that picks them up and drops them off every year was the one who found them, or what was left of them. The narrator of the story, someone famous but I can’t remember the name right now, philosophizes as the camera slowly zooms in on the eyes of one of the grizzlies that the man and his girlfriend lived with: he says something along the lines of not understanding what the dead man saw in the eyes of the bears, about how the man romanticized the animals and placed his own emotions on them, creating a false one-sided bond with the beasts. The narrator muses that what he sees in the eyes of this bear is nothing more than the cold, clear gaze of nature; emotionless and unapologetic.
This is how I have begun to see things. How you end up in a first world country in front of a plasma TV in your heated house and how you end up in a tiny bathroom somewhere in a war-torn third world country on the wrong end of genocide hiding for your life is not a matter of luck, of god or whatever; it is what it is. I don’t believe in a balance of good and evil anymore. I don’t believe that there is a philosophical or spiritual reason why I miscarried my first child, it didn’t happen to teach me anything, it happened because there was a mistake in the code and my body (thankfully) did what it had to do. Something about the absence of reason and emotion in the universe is oddly comforting to me. Things that happen on this planet still make me sad and angry and wish that all the people doing all the harm would be destroyed, but in moments when I don’t think about those things I find peace in the amazing things that happen in nature.
So when I started worrying today after talking to my coworker that this baby in me isn’t going to make it, I stopped and asked myself “What if then? What will I do?” and the answer is that there is nothing I can do.
Nothing is predestined.
The future does not exist yet, and nature does not have a grudge against me.
posted by vegan mum at 3:48 PM
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