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Capitol Pill | Tectonic Shifts

TARAWe’ve asked Karyn Schwartz, owner of the Sugarpill apothecary on E Pine, to contribute to CHS about health and Hill living on a semi-regular basis. If you’re an expert and want to share with the community in a recurring CHS column, we’d like to hear from you.

Weeks ago I began writing a love letter to my neighborhood – to all the people who on any given day I have interactions with that make me feel like I belong to this place; like I am at home, and that I matter here. Along the way, I kept thinking of some teachings I received very early on about how to assist people living with depression, and how one of the most important things to offer is actually just your presence — your real attention and your company — to anyone who is suffering in their heart or soul. How, in order to really heal, a person must know that their presence and existence matters, and that they are welcome; that they belong.

Up early to finish one or the other of these trains of thought, I saw the news that a major earthquake had occurred in Nepal just a few hours prior.  Once I read the initial reports, all I could think about were the people there, and in every place where something is happening that is so tragic and overwhelming that it brings people together in a communal gesture of courage, generosity and selflessness.

Searching the social media streams of everyone I know who has loved ones in that area, I came across a Twitter post by a journalist in Kathmandu named Kashish Das Shrestha, whose photographs of the immediate aftermath of the quake were shared in The New York Times:  “As I walk through city, i see people who are scared but ready to help, buildings standing still, but fragile. The day we dreaded arrived.”

Scared but ready to help.

This is what I cling to and tend to remember of the reports of any disaster – the stories of so many people who do remarkable things when called to by circumstance. The stories of how people come together to help in any way they can, offering all that they have to those they know and also to complete strangers, because that is just what you do when someone is suffering.  The stories of people coming together to hold each other up when something is too big, too awful, too dangerous for any one person to face on their own.

I have never been in a place in the exact moment when something historically calamitous has occurred, though like many of us, I have had personal ties to such events, known people who were there, or worked to help make things better in some way afterward. One of the things I am always so moved by is how the initial moments of crisis reveal something in people that is hard to sustain when the acute demands of the situation have passed: People can be scared and in danger themselves, but still be miraculously ready and willing and even healed by the opportunity to help others. We all have extraordinary potential to perform acts of unspeakable bravery and incredible kindness when faced with challenges and tragedies of all kinds.

This brings me back to my original unfinished thoughts; the way that our ties to a place and to each other uphold us in moments of crisis both large and small, and the way that healing from any kind of suffering is predicated on knowing that our presence, our efforts, even just our best intentions are necessary to those around us. And how you never know when a complete stranger might be the person who saves your very life, or how you might be called on to rescue someone yourself. I am thinking of the people facing disaster right now, and cannot help but pray that some dreaded day never arrives here. But I think also of the myriad ways we can make prayers out of the everyday gestures of compassion, willingness, and readiness to help others even when there is no emergency circumstance demanding that of us. The unremarkable acts of every one of us showing up wholeheartedly for our closest loved ones as well as out extended communities are what builds the foundation of resilience upon which we all lean from time to time to help us get through the mundane challenges of living, as well as the unforeseen tectonic shifts that sometimes do occur.

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