Creation and destruction

As I sat in the balcony of my third floor flat, chilling out with a hot cuppa and watching the construction of a building in the diagonally opposite plot of land, I cannot help wondering how much time, manpower, precision and skill goes into the job of creating something new, be it anything from concrete to canvas.

Destruction, in contrast, seems to occur easily and fast. Nature’s ways of destruction happen on its own terms and it is beyond our comprehensive abilities; and the destruction caused by humans themselves — deliberate devastations caused by belligerent nations — seems to happen with so much abandon and callousness.

From time to time, cataclysmic events, historic upheavals and wars have caused mammoth destructions and unimaginable trauma and have led the world and humanity almost to a teetering state of collapse. Nevertheless, the world and the human tribe have stood their ground.

When I was young, whenever a global calamity of unforeseen and unpredictable nature occurred, my grandparents used to make a sinister statement: “Time for end of the world is nearing!” I used to get befuddled and frightened by this apocalyptic statement and used to think of numerous possibilities of how the world could end. Notwithstanding all these, the world and the human tribe have stood their ground.

As I pondered how by the whirligig of time, the damage gets repaired and reconstructed and life in the world goes on as usual, I was pulled deep into a trail of thoughts that settled down conclusively on nature calling out to set in motion the collective power of human intelligence, skill and determination. Paradoxical it may look, but it must be nature’s way of permitting humans to expiate for their role in destruction.

The dichotomy between creation and destruction, peace and chaos, and abundance and scarcity creates an inflexion point where the human intelligence stands challenged, and learns, every time, to engage in the process of reviving, redeeming, restructuring and redesigning all that was gone and put the world back on terra firma and strive to bring back the temporarily lost halcyon days of the past.

Being the highest in the scale of evolution, humans have infinite potential and capacity at their disposal and a powerful skill, known as resilience, comes to the fore, quietly contributing to the process of recovery and redemption of all that was lost.

Resilience is not an innate quality or character trait of an individual, but is consciously developed through positive and motivating thoughts and actions. Vicissitudes of life strike everyone, and as an essential element of life, resilience becomes the sine qua non that guides mankind to navigate through stress and trauma and calamities in life, and keep moving forward. As in physics, resilience in humans works on the same bounce-back mechanism and helps them to recover quickly from unfortunate circumstances and setbacks, both individually and collectively. Survivors of diseases and tragedies of a serious, crippling and debilitating nature are ideal examples of resilience.

As essential as it is for individuals to develop this skill to tackle their personal losses and illnesses, its collective presence and application can create an egregore, that is capable of protecting and nurturing back humanity and the world at large, from crumbling and hitting the nadir. If humans had given up and surrendered at the very first encounter with devastation, downfall and setback, the world and its inhabitants won’t be what they are today.

It is said that the human body has its own intelligence and the mind, supplementing and complementing with its own intelligence, contribute to developing the skill of resilience. Individuals who fail to tap the power of resilience, through emotional regulation and cognitive flexibility, surrender to the negative energy of trauma and bury themselves into an abyss.

Hope, optimism, belief, trust, confidence, acceptance, everything is encapsulated in resilience, and it becomes indispensable, for humanity itself to survive and work for the revival, regeneration, preservation and uplift of the world.

After all, the raison d’etre of humanity is to protect itself and its abode, the world. It is the collective power of human resilience that holds the world and humanity together from collapse.

newshara@yahoo.com