Putting my younger child to bed may take anywhere between forty minutes and two hours. That’s plenty of time for self-reflection. Today was a warm day, for February. I took a walk around lunchtime, went all the way to the forest. On my way, I noticed that the clouds were pink. I listened to a good webinar. The sunset tonight was even prettier than the lunchtime clouds, I had some good conversations and children ate their salad without fussing. It was a good day. Then I remember that for a couple of families in Ste-Rose, a small town north of Montreal, today was the last day they hugged their children. Their children were murdered by a public transit driver who slammed his bus into a daycare, intentionally. I pray that one day these parents find some form of healing, but they will never have a luxury to forget what happened on February 8. I remember parents, children, family members, neighbours pulling at the rubble in a desperate effort to save their loved ones after the earthquake. I remember about the war, because I remember about it every day of my life.

So, how pretty was my sunset? Can one have a good day? Has one a right to “live, laugh, love” in a desperately broken world? Am I being insensitive? Or celebrating my own survival, the fact that the worse only happens to others? I am grasping at straws and then I find a quote by Arundhati Roy that expresses perfectly how I want to show up in this world. It doesn’t make anything better, but I write it down.

“To love. To be loved. To never forget your own insignificance. To never get used to the unspeakable violence and the vulgar disparity of life around you. To seek joy in the saddest places. To pursue beauty to its lair. To never simplify what is complicated or complicate what is simple. To respect strength, never power. Above all, to watch. To try and understand. To never look away. And never, never to forget.” 
― Arundhati Roy, The Cost of Living