Life is not as simple as a bell curve drawn by a poet with a poor grasp of mathematics.
Take a number of such curves differently sized and warped and string them all together…you get something like a rollercoaster track. Not a perfect correlation, but a closer approximation, reflecting the balance of curses and blessings in individuals or populations over time.
Remember hiking to what you thought was the mountain’s peak, sweaty, and soaking in the glorious energy of an ancient mountain chain, then seeing a trail sign indicating the peak is actually a long distance away? You have to descend and climb again to reach the summit.
A cat is crushed by the heartless momentum of huge truck tires. The feline has 8 lives left. What will these lives be like? Sitting in the warm loving lap of a human enamored by their catness, or existence in the streets and alleys, scavenging from garbage cans and dumpsters, battle scars under the fur, an ear badly torn in in a spitting yowling ferocious whirlwind of a fight?
We are all blessed and cursed in different proportions at different times. There is nothing fair about it, trekking up the mountains and rushing down to trek toward the next peak. Some of us are mostly blessed, others mostly cursed, many fall in the middle. Almost all of us visit one or the other extreme in the course of a lifetime
A celebrated Palastinian poet and professor named Refaat Aleer pens a beautiful poem titled If I Must Die. Then he dies in an Israeli airstrike along with members of his family.
Young Israeli joyous party goers are killed or kidnapped by Hamas; Israel loses a thousand and a half souls by a Hammas airstrike and invasion. Nothing is resolved and the ensuing war kills thousands of people.
In the Ukraine, corpses of those shot or blown apart litter the streets. The death toll goes to hundreds of thousands.Retaliatory strikes are made against Russia. No matter which partisan tallies the deaths, no one is winning. Everyone loses.
Most of the dead, even oppressed ones, had both happiness and misery woven in their lives. If there is a divine plan to account for the joy, mayhem and murders, it cannot be discerned.
It is not all about human against human. Green nature generally can bring happiness, beauty. It also brings tsunamis, earthquakes, fires, hurricanes, tornados, droughts, floods, mudslides…
Countless weddings bring joy to many couples. Children are born and celebrated. Aging, illness, other deaths create widows and widowers. Many of them had wished their partner to outlive them. These things are not controlled by fragile mortals.
What of your life? Have you suffered from curses, been lifted up by blessings? What has the balance been in the past? What do you see in the future?
~ Wry Welwood,
May 2024.
This piece was previously posted as a poetry prompt in Scrittura on the Medium platform.
Lot of good questions Roy, and no, life is not a bell curve although metaphorically it could be an arc. And the wheels of the universe are pretty much beyond our understanding but i think it is useful to do the right thing regardless of understanding how the universe works (whatever one sees the right thing to be), and this can also become a work in progress if one can stays open to the learning feedback from the universe offers.