Doesn’t it sort of seem like we’re watching The Disaster Channel? I feel like the world is going to hell in a hand basket. In the past month alone, we’ve had the Boston Marathon bombing, the Texas fertilizer disaster and the Oklahoma tornado. While we watch on our televisions, and read on our computers, and newspapers (does anybody read the newspaper anymore, except my husband?), can we really take in such total devastation?  I see the horror, try hard to conjure up the experience, but can you really know what losing your home, or you town, or you leg, would really be like unless you do?

And yet, these experiences devastate me, and get into the cracks of my soul like a noxious gas. They warn of life as you know it being taken away in a New York minute. They tell the story of everyday’s  fragility in words and pictures, using someone else’s world as illustration. They scream out at you, like the guy with the sign that says, “The End is Near.”

And so instead of the fear that cripples, when these things happen, I am trying to go the way of the gratitude. Your house, which needs painting and new steps and a bathroom renovation is perfect. Your thighs, dimpled with the dreaded cellulite get you from place to place one foot in front of the other. Your face, getting wrinkled and the subject of your worry, forget it, it’s all good, the proof of a life fully lived. The perspective these disasters can pull out of us is the only good thing I can see. Life, unpredictable, is ours to squander or celebrate. The mundane is the gold. Do we only realize it when it’s taken from us. That’s too late. Today I will read about the people of Oklahoma and send my donation to wherever it will help, and then I will  hug my life a little harder, notice all the flowers on my walk, and sing hallelujah for the piles of clothes in the middle of my kid’s rooms.