12th October - Bali
One could be forgiven for wondering if the planets are misaligned or if there is unusual solar activity at this time, given the year we've had and the current state of our poor old weary planet.As one friend recently commented, "The TV news should have an "R" rating on it these days, with all the violence that's being broadcast".
Regular readers of this newsletter may recall that last year I wrote a piece based on my trip to Bali.
This year in May I returned to Bali for the fourth time, for my honeymoon. There was, however, a change in Bali (or myself), which I could not pinpoint at the time, but has proven to be almost prophetic in light of the events in October.
Perhaps I had visited Bali once too often, but somehow the streets looked dirtier, the traffic more chaotic, the bars seedier and the hawkers more desperate. The local people remained as I had described them - patient, contained and philosophical, but there was more and more evidence of the influence of western values slowly eroding the essence of a way of life that these people had held so dear for centuries.
Little did I know that the very hotel I stayed at (the same hotel that I had stayed at the year before) would be, months later, the first place that my bleeding, burnt and terrorised countrymen and women would crawl to from the inferno of Paddy's Bar.
The Dewi Sri Cottages hotel is located only 150 metres down a laneway, which runs next to the bar. According to news reports, victims of the blast staggered into the hotel grounds, where guests threw their burnt bodies into the swimming pool or under showers in their own rooms and ripped up sheets to serve as bandages in desperate attempts to help these unfortunate, mostly young people.
I must have walked down that lane at least twenty times a day on my way to the restaurants, money changers and shops that lined the main road in which both Paddy's Bar and the Sari Bar were located.
I had missed being a victim of this atrocity by mere months.
There is a new term which appears to have been coined in response to September 11 and is frequently used in relation to the Bali bombings - "Survivor Guilt", whereby survivors have been ravaged by guilt for their good fortune when so many others have died.
Whilst I can appreciate the despair which would lead to such thinking, it never ceases to amaze me how much we humans torture ourselves with our minds.
To have survived hell and to prevail and then to turn on oneself for having done so, seems to me to be a perfect illustration of the inherent problems that we have in our western outlook on life.
Don't get me wrong-trauma and grief on such a scale can have an incalculable impact on a person's psyche, but it does seem worthy of examination in these extreme situations to observe how some people emotionally survive where others don't, and at the same time there are strong parallels between the kind of thinking which feeds anxiety.
Viktor Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist who survived the horrors of Auschwitz and later wrote an inspiring book of his experience called "Man's Search for Meaning", in which he observed that those who emotionally survived the unthinkable were those who lived in the moment, not clinging to the past, nor entertaining the future, but remaining totally centred on the now, even if that need be this one second, in order to get through.
He also wrote that, in his opinion, based on what he observed, one could survive anything if one could give it a meaning.
So how can we make sense of trauma on such a grand scale, or any scale for that matter, given Frankl's philosophy?
It is indeed up to each person to find their own meaning in the events which cross their lives, but it is helpful to ask, "What do I want to take away from this? Only the bad? Or can I think about what I have learned about myself or others, my capacity for courage, or selflessness, or love. My capacity to keep trying, keep going, despite what seem to be endless obstacles or my capacity to give, and above all, to forgive even, ultimately, the unforgivable - no easy task.
But unless we unhook from the other's ability to invoke fear in us, we remain a victim and, in a perverse way, we continue to act out against ourselves, the very same cruelty that was perpetrated upon us and which made us fearful in the first place.
To those who survived when others did not, forgive yourselves.
The greatest gift you can give to the world, others and yourself is to live your life well, give of yourself and never ever give up on life out of fear. And you know what? That is also the greatest revenge.
By Bev Aisbett - Summer 2002
