“BOOM!!”
A deep, loud, explosion rips through the heart of Colombo.
Silence falls immediately. Followed by the sound of wailing sirens. Some people dead. Others reeling – from both, the shock of the explosion, and the sight of bloodied bodies; laying lifeless.. Thrown by the force: Of the BOMB.
Media soon begins to flash news related to the incident. “7 people killed. 68 injured.” All they become to everyone else, is just another statistic.
Imagine this. You wake up one morning. It’s a perfectly fine morning. Up until the time you get a call.. or a message or something of the sort – some news in general – that tells you that someone you really care about isn’t exactly with you anymore? What would you do if you knew that someone you really cared about but never took the time to show it, just died?
Do you think you would’ve taken the time to tell them you love them? Or would it not really affect you? Where you remain completely detached and don’t really care any less?
I’ve noticed a lot of us taking people for granted – I’m seeing it all around me. Just yesterday, I was told of this lady’s sister who passed away – of a massive heart attack. She’d driven herself to work last morning – no one knows what time because she’s normally a person who is late to work – and was found unconscious beside her car in the parking lot. Somebody had gone there purely by chance and found her laying there. By the time the paramedics took her to the hospital and tried operating on her, she had already passed away.
This lady is a person who helped me a lot when I was in Melbourne, and she was planning on building a house with her sister (who died). Things were getting under way and they were rather excitedly getting things together, imagining what it’d be like to be living as neighbours (they were both building their own respective houses on the same plot of land) and they even sent stuff to Sri Lanka for relatives – just so they’d have less clutter n old stuff and they could go to town putting all the new stuff in. As it so happened, this lady who died even celebrated her 50th birthday with her friends here – 2 years before she was actually 50!
She was 48 when she died.
Now her sister who she’s survived by wants to complete this house, no matter what happens, just so that her sister’s dream is fulfilled.
Another thing that shook me really, was the reality of bombs. We needn’t be the actual targets of these things, but given their modus operandi, they take a lot of people with them. Sri Lanka’s been at war for 25 years apparently, and the terrorists here pioneered suicide bombing. How do we know who’s a terrorist and who’s not? How do we know, when we go out – be it to work, or to play pool, or to a restaurant or wherever it maybe.. How are we that sure we’d come back alive? Just recently, there was a bomb in Fort, near the World Trade Center. Hundreds of people use that road on a daily basis. If our office was still there in the WTC building, the shuttle services from the Trans Asia office to WTC would’ve used that road. And it could have well exploded when a shuttle was driving down that road. What if.
There’s a train station just a little away from where the bomb did explode. An uncle of mine who was traveling by train from Mount Lavinia was about to get off the train there and go to the pub at the Hilton. He felt something wasn’t right and decided to get off the train at the next station. No sooner the train left the platform was the explosion! What saved him – only God knows. 9 people died in that bomb and over 90 people were injured.
But imagine what it’d been like though. Just to be told that someone as close to you as your sister, brother, husband, wife, boyfriend, girlfriend, mother, father, whoever they may be – who you possibly even spoke to the night before and possibly had a fight with even – is no longer there. How would you ever take back the nasty things you said? How would you forgive yourself – when you know that you love someone as much as you love them; to whom the last thing you said was “yeah, whatever” before hanging up the phone in their face, is now dead?
My question at the end of this all is – is it worth fighting? We’re all here for a very short period of time. Do we really need to fight of all things? Fighting is healthy to an extent – but do we need to feel bitter about it? One thing I will always maintain is – people have disagreements, people have fights. That’s perfectly fine. It may even help a relationship in some instances. But learn from it. And learn to always resolve a dispute then and there. Come to a compromise. And do it before the moment is lost. Because the more you dwell on it, the more bitter you’re gonna get. And where’s that going to get you at the end of the day?
Think about it – Is it really worth it?
