Wisdom out of disaster
The end of the year is a reinvigorating time, even if the weight of life experience adds a tinge of sadness to the spanking-new mood of resolution. This year there is a special grief: last Boxing Day's tsunami, a memory shared by millions of people. It will probably continue to haunt us at the year's end well into the future, because of its natural origin, drama and scale.
Compared with emotions stirred up by terrorist attacks, assassinations, wars and plane crashes, those associated with the tsunami are of a pure sort. Those other evils of modern life are embedded in a network of complex, socially constructed issues that are far too complex for any individual to grasp or remedy. Most of us feel we would like to - and should be able to - understand why such things happen. But, unless we are touched directly, we usually end up losing interest after the story slips from the headlines.
Everyone can understand a big wave, however. We bonded in unprecedented numbers because the mutual experience was free from the contaminating effects of differences in opinion about religion, cultural values, politics or technology.
In Sri Lanka, psychologists noted that acceptance was far faster and deeper than in the aftermath of man-made disasters in the region. There was little evidence of people suffering from debilitating trauma or engaging in extended denial.
Like a sky-wide sunset or an iceberg, the tsunami made us feel small. That awe can be traced to the urge we all harbour to submit completely to power - the primal appeal of returning to the sensing, unfettered state of infancy.
Nature, our gut tells us, is a safe place to indulge the illusion of completely letting go.
It is a dangerous impulse - according to conventional western secular wisdom - because this same fond desire to be taken care of is what supports kingdoms, dictatorships and cults. This jars with the dominant orthodoxies of science and democracy, which call for a population that strives towards mastery and independence.
Meanwhile, the psychological language of many of the traditionally religious peoples most devastated by the tsunami meant that they understood the disaster as an opportunity to surrender themselves anew to the godly omnipotence behind it.
If we say the tsunami was caused by an arbitrary shifting of tectonic plates, it is a way of explaining how it happened. But that is quite different from understanding: events need to be ascribed meaning, not just attributed to scientific causes and effects.
Yet, its very arbitrariness and suddenness seemed to make the tsunami highly meaningful. It jolted people out of their sense of invulnerability in a way that other far-off, less dramatic tragedies - such as children starving in Africa - cannot. Well-heeled, vacationing Europeans caught up in the disaster went through an abrupt psychological plunge from the very pinnacle to the depths of psychologist Abraham Maslow's so-called 'hierarchy of needs' - from a focus on elevated issues like personal growth, down to the basic physiological need of simply staying alive.
It was so intense that many are now forever psychologically welded to the moment, bonded to fellow survivors in a peculiarly deep way against which everyday relationships pale.
Far more than socially complex tragedies, the tsunami memory is a reminder to treasure and enjoy life. Like Dickens, certain parables or the Christmas story itself, it steers thoughts to the essentials. It makes us want to be good.
What better frame of mind in which to make a New Year's resolution?
Jean Nicol looks at everyday issues from the point of view of a psychologist
