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Archive for July, 2011

Jul 29

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The best ones will never be our future

200,000 gathered in at a memorial and flower ceremony in Oslo on Monday

The best ones will never be our future, said a great Norwegian poet, Nordahl Grieg in 1942. It’s a poem that has spoken to me since the terrible massacres that happened in our country less than a week ago.

 

 

 

 

Death will burn like wheat,

More clearly than before we see

Each life in white pain:

It is the best ones who die.

 

The living rule the world.

A flock is always left—

The indispensable clever ones,

Life’s second best.

 

The best ones are murdered in the prisons,

Swept away by bullets and sea.

The best ones will never be our future.

The best ones simply die.

 

Each one who has known them

Is richer than the dead were—

They were the friends of men

And children’s fathers.

 

They have improved the life they left.

They live through other men.

On their graves we will write:

The best ones will always remain.

The flowers will be composted into dirt for a memorial garden, cards, stuffed animals and other memorabilia will be put in a museum.

I have been thinking about this a lot. Last week some of our country’s best youth and adults were senselessly murdered. The best ones will never be our future. But the girls, boys—some of them only 14 years old—, men and women have enriched our lives, and their death is bringing a country together in a unity that none thought possible. They will always remain with us.

We don't want the best ones to die

In the midst of this tragedy I think of all the others who die so senselessly. The ones the world never will know about. Many of them are also some of the best people in the world. How much we have missed because young girls and boys in Burma, in Africa’s Horn, and in Afghanistan never got to grow up. How many of them could have brought about great changes and joy to the world. The best ones always die. This is true in Burma. This was true in Oslo and Utoy.

We, who are life’s second best, need to make sure that the best ones will not continue to die, but live and make the world better. We also need to make sure that the ones that do die did not do so in vain.

———

 

 

PS. I have been out of touch for a month. The reason: Our Internet got disconnected and this is how long to get it back. I will try to be a regular blogger from now on. Stay close.

Jul 4

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How to listen to the silent pleas

I started reading a children’s book called Momo. The plan is to read it for my kids, but I was so excited about it that I started reading it on my own. It’s going to be great. As the title suggests, the main character in the book is a girl named Momo. And this is why all the people in the village went to see Momo:

She listened in a way that made slow-witted people have flashes of inspiration. It wasn’t that she actually said anything or asked questions that put such ideas into their heads. She simply sat there and listened with the utmost attention and sympathy, fixing them with her big, dark eyes, and they suddenly became aware of ideas whose existence they had never suspected.

Momo could listen is such a way that worries and indecsisive people knew their own minds from one moment to the next, or shy people felt happy and hopeful. And if someone felt that his life had been an utter failure, and that he himself was only one among millions of wholly unimportant people who could be replaced as easily as broken windowpanes, he could go and pour out his heart to Momo. And, even as he spoke, he would come to realize by some mysterious means that he was absolutely wrong: that there was only one person like himself in the whole world, and that, consequently, he mattered to the world in his own particular way.

Such was Momo’s talent for listening.

I read this today and decided I needed no other devotion than this one: I want to become a listener like Momo. I want to listen with my mouth shut, my ears and heart open. I want to hear words not spoken, as the well as the spoken ones. I want to hear beyond the words and I want to offer my advice not with more words, but with an understanding attitude.

And then I want to listen with a heart willing to act. I want to listen to the silent cries of the world. Of mothers, children, and desperate fathers. Of farmers, midwives and teenagers with no hope. Of orphans, of the sick, of the dying, and the ones sitting with the dying. I want to listen to the silent sobs, the pleas for justice, and the determined demands for righteousness.

I don’t know how the story of Momo will develop yet, neither do I know my own story. But I know that in a world so full of noise, there is a great need for the ones who can listen. I want to be one of the listeners rather than the noisemaker.

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