Reacting to Boston

It's always been difficult for me to process certain kinds of things.  Anger, extreme sadness, and similar kinds of very strong emotions don't come easy to and for me.  It's as if I have some kind of internal governor that just stops my emotional engine from over-revving.  It's both a blessing and a curse.  A blessing in the sense that I generally speaking stay very calm 99.8% of time time, even in the most trying of circumstances.  A curse in that for some portion of that 99.8% the immediate release of anger or other strong emotions would probably be far more healthy than not.

Even now I'm just not sure what to make of events in Boston.

In some respects I am very thankful for television and the Internet, as they keep me informed...but...they also create an almost surreal, "out of body" experience.  It's a very spectator way of dealing with horrific events such as what we all witnessed yesterday in Boston.  Try as I might, my mind seems to stop at some level and not think about the emotions of anger and sadness that some must feel at these events, no matter how much information saturation surrounds me.  Therein lies something of a protection mechanism I suspect.

Protection, now there's a concept amplified by yesterday.  My rational mind knows that the very act of living is fought with danger.  I could go out to my car tomorrow morning, start it up, head up Cherry Street and then get rammed by truck.  Might it happen?  I suppose it could.  But it probably won't.  What I can't do though is to stop getting into my car every morning out of feat of what might occur.  Then the very thing we cherish...life...ceases to exist if we over-react to possibilities of danger out there in the world.

Here's to hoping that those who were injured or harmed yesterday are healed and that families of the victims eventually find some peace within their losses.  Here's to also hoping that we grieve, but that grief doesn't lead to us to react in ways such that we lose the very things we cherish the most.  Here's to hoping that we allow a sense of justice, not revenge, to prevail from what happened yesterday.