Lightning Strikes

How can you defend against the unpredictable?  If fate decrees that your life be tossed before the path of an oncoming storm, a storm of such devastating power that it could tear the very foundation from beneath you, what can you do?

I feel very defenceless right now.  My mind is racing in so many directions that I find myself dumbfounded… unable to really focus or *do* anything.  Not that there IS anything I can do.

Except fear.

I’m doing that in spades right now.  I think it must be similar to how the people in the path of a tornado must feel.  You know that it’s coming – its presence has been confirmed, its path predicted.  There are things you can do, but storms are such erratic, unpredictable entities that you really have no way of knowing whether every step you take will prove to be futile or not.

A storm might deal one home a glancing blow while completely annihilating its neighbour – there’s no explanation for it, no divine reasoning behind… no sense to it all.

But people hope, right?  They batten down the hatches, take all the precautionary steps they know to try and minimize the impending damage – there’s hope even within the fear… to give that up is to admit defeat.

When it comes to life, or the lives of those we love, I don’t think the majority of humans are prepared to admit defeat easily… we’re pretty much hard-wired against it.

I wonder how much hope people would have in the face of an approaching storm though, if they were told that there was NO hope of coming through unscathed.  If destruction was not just a possibility, but a certainty?

I think it would not be fear consuming them, but despair.  Or perhaps anger?  Anger is a powerful emotion… one from which to draw strength.  Although likely just as futile as despair when one is standing in the path of something destructive you can’t control.

I’m feeling all of these emotions right now… fear, despair, anger… and helplessness.  I’m vacillating between those.  Futility can’t come in the door yet because I’m too stubborn to give up hope… no matter what they say a storm will do.

Lightning struck in my world yesterday… a direct hit on the one who’s the foundation in my world.  Its label is Adenocarcinoma, and they say it’s not curable.  “They” use ambiguous words like “manageable” to describe it…

I’m clinging to the vague hope to be found in that… choosing to look away from devastation of the first part.  I can’t NOT hope…

I just can’t…