How the mind escapes.
Last week, a riveting scene of a man standing alone on a beach in Thailand, with an impending huge wave engulfing him froze me. I sat there silently, stumped and numbed all the same time, on the blue seat in my TV room as the BBC docu unfolded scenes after scenes of real-life video footages recorded by the tsunami survivors. The reality of me being there only 2 days before the disaster, right in the heart of Patong last year, was something I never wanted to express in writing. It was ironic, that only DH can write about it in this blog and I could not bring myself to pen it down. The scenes of men and women running for their lives in Thailand brought waves of emotion, but I did not want to identify them. The emotions were just as quickly engulfed by other more pressing worries, like work and how the scripts and filming of JALAN are turning out.My mind did it again…it escapes.
Just yesterday, I caught myself feeling a very sharp pang of nervousness when someone mentioned about the possibility of SIngapore being hit by an earthquake in Sumatra. This prediction was by the same guy in Thailand who predicted last year’s tsunami, whom everyone ignored then. I have read about this before, and at that time I remembered thinking – apart from this prediction, I have 24 books to see to publication. Singapore and the tsunami can wait. My family will be in Malaysia and I will be in Vancouver by then. We will be safe. That was my mind escaping again then. But somehow, the mention yesterday was a bit more biting,if not reflective.
Today, I flipped through the newspapers and read a review piece on the tsunami documentaries that will be flooding the tv screens over this next few days. One of them, was about how a group of scientists is racing against time to see if the Cascadia Fault will reap apart again and cause a ruckus it did in the 1700, when the first recorded tsunami destroyed Japan. The scientists are fervent that North America will be hit by a tsunami soon, killing half a million. Vancouver may be one of the cities possibly drowned by tidal waters. So where do I go now? And to where, does my mind escape to?
God has a way to press the point that our minds have limited capacities. He has taught mine.