Trauma as life

THE EDITOR: In my pre-Christmas letter I had insisted that we as Trinis would have a great Christmas season, some of us clinking our champagne glasses on Old Year’s Night, some of us drinking a rum and ponche de creme somewhere in Moruga, or dancing to parang, Paramin style, each to his own according to his circumstances.

But what’s next for the new year? For me, I was struck at the beginning by a virtual bolt of lightning, the love of my life, my "dearest partner” – if not “of greatness" as Lady Macbeth would describe her husband in that great play (Act 1 Scene 11), but at least part of an indefinable oneness, bereft of the conventional dining, chocolates and flowers, only simple devotion, her sense of duty to her husband, and in my own raucous way similarly so – was suddenly disabled after having a wonderful Christmas like all Trinis.

But such was not to be and the easy rhythm we enjoyed as an elderly couple suddenly turned into chaos. At first in my humanity I screamed and wondered why us. But then I rationalised why not us, for who are we to assume that we are exempt from trauma when the whole world is reeling from it?

Which made me somewhat philosophical trying to demystify the nature of things, when suddenly, like the “flush of a full blown rose” (Wordsworth), it dawned upon me that it was all part of the human process, that the “Great I Am” (Mary Did You Know?), in creating us, would have devised a wonderful plan for his children, not to come into this world merely to live, eat and survive, but to be the architect of their own destiny, using the measure of “challenge" as the means to engineer their own growth and development as they embark on this journey we call life.

And whether you succeed or not would be determined by how you would have utilised your own God-given gifts and those you have acquired through socialisation to deal with such challenges. Everyone of us has our own cross to bear, our Gethsemane to face, our karma to resolve, to prepare for Judgement Day, because it is all part of the plan of the Great I Am.

Which is why I won’t tear my hair and scream over my own trauma. Instead, I must face the winds of that trauma and get my ship battered and my sails torn striving to reach the port of safety. And so we all must, for it is what living is all about.

DR ERROL NARINE BENJAMIN

via e-mail