Like many other people, I am experiencing the shock wave created by the shootings in Aurora Colorado. I can't possibly think about what it had to have been like for the people in that darkened theater. The best I can do is just sit down and begin a list of people who need to be lifted up in my heart, in my prayers, in my waking thoughts.
I try to think about the person who carried those guns into that theater. We may never know how and why his reality reached a point where these actions made sense for him. I have personally spent time in the presence of real mental illness. There are lots of people who spend their lives in a reality that has no relationship to the world that I know, the day-to-day lives that most of us experience. When I think about the kind of displaced anger that could lead to this specific act of insanity...well...it just stops me in my tracks. It brings my heart up into my throat. It makes my ribs shut down around my lungs.
The unhappy soul who caused this pain is not the first person to create an act of terrible violence on an unsuspecting public. I had a friend who was a child on the play ground of a grade school in Houston where a bomb was set off in 1959. I remember the first time I heard that story. It was in the mid-1970s. We were sitting at the kitchen table at her mother's suburban home, wrapped in the safety of our very ordinary lives. The chill and horror the story brought into the room was remarkable.
Another story of anonymous violence came from a friend who experienced the University of Texas sniper in 1966 He was pinned down on the mall in front of the University of Texas tower. He spent hours there, waiting, not knowing what was happening, what was going to happen next. I have never asked him how he feels that experience has impacted his life, but how could it not?
The only thing that any of us can do is be reminded of just how fragile and impermanent everything is in life. Let the people in your life know how much you love them. Hug your children. Smile at your neighbor. Wave at friends you spot on the street. Be nicer to that grumpy person in line at the grocery store.
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