how experience changes your perspective

i was watching tv this evening, flipping back & forth between Extreme Makeover: Home Edition & the stories featured on Dateline. i saw 2 homeless families being given a new start, a home in which to stay warm & safe while they regained their footing. whatever the reason that this show somehow has become controversial, i enjoy it. it warms my heart to see people helping people. alternated with the horrific account of a young boy in Uganda who suffered an existence i never could have conjured up even in my own worst nightmares, i guess i was setting myself up for a good tear fest. it wouldn't have shocked me if it had been Extreme Makeover, it wouldn't have been the first time. or it might have been hearing about Patrick, the little Ugandan boy, but i was too shocked & horrified to tear up at that i think. what got me was the final news story on Dateline.

on August 24, 1992, the southern tip of FL was ravaged by Category 5 Hurricane Andrew. we all know this. we have heard the statistics of how this was the costliest storm on record. we have seen footage & interviews. in the past, i looked at that complete devastation with compassion & awe. those poor people that lost everything. EVERYTHING. to see homes crushed to splinters of wood & memories scattered like so much worthless litter. it made me sad.

but tonight i viewed the destruction, listened to some people recount their tales of survival, saw the footage of 165mph sustained winds savagely assaulting anything that stood in Andrew's path. and i felt something different this time.

this time it was recognition.

you don't understand what it really means to hear someone say "the walls of my home pulsated around me, almost as if they were breathing, from the force of the winds" until you've felt your own home tremble & heard it groan. you don't understand what it really means when someone says "you hear the wind howling & 2 hours feels like a lifetime as the shingles on your roof snap & you just pray that it doesn't fall in on you" until you've laid on your living room floor all night praying that the incessant deafening scream of the wind would just stop before you lose your mind...and that when it does, your house is still a place you can live. you don't understand what it really means to have a meteoroligist stay up all night broadcasting non-stop for hour after tireless hour until your eyes are the ones glued to the screen for as long as you have electricity & then find that you are unable to tear yourself away from the battery-powered radio where the tv news is being simul-cast, waiting to hear those beautiful words that the worst is over.

i get teased a bit about my dread of hurricanes. but i watched this show & felt the sickening terror of what these storms are capable of. i understood that it could have been me last year. it wasn't & for that i am grateful. but i sat there tonight with tears running down my face...understanding in a small way the mind-numbing fear as you hope that it will stop & that when it does you are just thankful to be alive. you may think i'm crazy or dramatic but until you ride it out, until you've felt the power of a seething angry Mother Nature, you can only look at those images & hear those words & feel compassion. when you've experienced it--even on a smaller scale--your perspective changes & you understand. and if you're me, when you watch a little girl cry when someone finds her baby doll or a grandmother silently weep as she clings to the photos that are all she has left, that she has pulled from the wreckage that used to be her home, tears spill down your own cheeks & you are thankful because you realize that with a slight twist of fate, it could have been you too...