What if you meet the love of your life three days before his wedding? What do you do when the woman you are meant to be with is leaving for a land far away, and you watch her become smaller and smaller in the distance as the train pulls away from the station?
How does a wife react, watching her husband and child be killed by a terrorist in their own home?
These situations are heartbreaking and the last seems downright hopeless.
I recently interviewed NBC’s Middle East correspondent Martin Fletcher via Skype about his new book, Walking Israel, in which he writes the untold stories of the people of Israel.
He talks about Smadar Haran, a woman who in 1979 survived a terrorist attack in her apartment building, which left her husband and four-year-old dead.
During the attack, she hid in a crawl space above a door in her apartment building and, to keep her two-year-old daughter from making a sound, unwittingly smothered her to death. It was a tragedy of epic proportions.
Interestingly, one of her psychologists, the one who was able to help her the most, and who she could best relate to, was an Israeli Arab.
Haran’s story is even more touching, because her form of “revenge” was to go on – live, love and have a family.
This story gives hope on so many levels, from the ability to overcome the worst horrors imaginable to receiving help and comfort from someone she could have easily categorized and blamed.
It’s easy to be sad in the midst of hard situations or even impossible ones. But really, does it get you anywhere? Is giving up on what you want in life a good idea?
I have found optimism in knowing even the mightiest military leaders in the world are sensitive and hold our dreams in high regard.
I recently interviewed U.S. Secretary of Defence Robert Gates in San Diego, Calif. He said he relates to the young people who make up the American military as if they were his own children.
“I think going from being a university president to this job has actually made it harder. I spent 4-1/2 years watching 18- to 25-year-olds walk around campus in flip-flops and shorts and T-shirts, backpacks and have fun, going to class and then in an instant, I was watching kids exactly the same age, 18 to 25, in full body armour in Iraq and Afghanistan, so it is very personal for me.”
So while his job is to send young men and women to war, I imagine his feelings are such that he would prefer them to be learning and enjoying life.
It’s so easy to see the hardship and despair in the world; spend time in the slums of Rio de Janeiro or the townships in South Africa and, even closer to home, see a person you care about suffer heartbreak or hopelessness.
The complexities of life and people can be staggering. However, there are symbols of hope all around us: one need only to refer to the Hatikvah, the national anthem of Israel, which translated means “The Hope.” Some of the words translate as, “Our hope is not lost. The hope of 2,000 years.”
Two thousand years is a long time, and I’m not that patient of a person, but I have to believe almost every situation has hope.
Everything has possibilities if you are willing to make changes and open your mind and heart to take a risk. I’ve been called a romantic and a dreamer for believing in the impractical and the supposed impossible.
Former U.S. president John F. Kennedy once said, “When written in Chinese, the word ‘crisis’ is composed of two characters. One represents danger, the other represents opportunity.”
So, while no one chooses to be faced with a crisis, and sometimes decisions others make affect our lives adversely in the most traumatic ways, there is an up side: we do have choices. We can chose to focus on the danger, the pain and sadness, or we can find opportunities.
One person who knows suffering and loss is Academy Award-winner Gerda Weissmann Klein. Klein is a Holocaust survivor who lost her entire family in the concentration camps.
She, too, knows pain and she uses her experiences to empathize with people who have suffered.
Over lunch one day she said, “Pain should not be wasted. It should be used to reach out to someone else. You not only help the other person, you alleviate your own pain.”
So perhaps the Greeks have the right idea. When situations out of your control make you want to scream at the top of your lungs and throw dishes against the wall, do it. Then look at the positive, at least you have dishes to break, or well had dishes!