The Still Point in a Turbulent world

The scene could be from a movie. A war movie if you’re watching it or a horror movie if you’re an extra on the set. In a matter of seconds, half a struggling city’s residents are rendered homeless as a few thousand tons of Ammonium Nitrate form a lethal combination with a fire and a warehouse of fireworks and Beirut lies obliterated. Again.

I remember seeing such scenes of devastation in the limited media of the mid-nineteen seventies as a child, and thinking how life could be any worse. A civil war, child soldiers, invasions and political manipulations all built powerful and emotive images in my mind which struggled to find any comprehensible reason for it all.

Nearly half a century later, I watch in awe as the searing white shock wave from the explosion hit my emotional solar plexus harder than a punch I received many years ago from a much larger boy which had me doubled up in my own pathetic version of ‘I can’t breathe.’ I deserved that right hook to the body. Nobody, especially the Lebanese people, who have endured millenniums of mismanagement and eons of upheaval deserved this. Fifteen years of a civil war were made to look like a left arm throw (for a right hander) in just a few explosive seconds.

With the sound of broken glass been swept up all around her, a 79 year old Grandmother sits at one of the few surviving pieces of furniture in her apartment. The piano is over sixty years old according to her Granddaughter, May Abboud Melki, and like her Grandmother, it has survived many things – including a civil war and an equally long Syrian occupation. The window frames of her once tidy apartment lie over the torn lavender coloured upholstery of her sitting room, and the curtain rods resemble a game of giant pick up sticks. Family photos smile defiantly out of their glassless frames in memory of a happier time, and the pot plants on her now open balcony are being restored to their upright position.

While she plays she wears her mask, and the first two chords are instantly recognizable even to a musical philistine like myself.

The tune is ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and its playing is as poignant as its meaning. Perhaps she was longing for the sake and return to the old times, and she would have remembered well the paradise and playground of Beirut in the swinging sixties. Could the Scottish poet Robert Burns ever have envisioned that his 1788 penning of this Scottish folk song would be played in the still moment of such devasting destruction? A song about reunions and relationships sung in the humour of Hogmanay, now an air of hope and humanity in the horror of Lebanon.

Just like the band played on whilst the Titanic sank, this lone pianist teaches us that resilience can be found in the most unlikely of places, and like the Callery Pear tree which survived the 9/11 attacks on New York’s twin towers in 2001, she sends out the seedlings of hope.

Every year the seeds of this remarkable ‘Survivor Tree’ are given to three communities which have endured tragedy in recent years (Wikipedia).

At this challenging time for the world – how on earth do you pick only three?

If hope and resilience were finite concepts, it wouldn’t be possible to make this ‘Sophie’s choice’. Yet these qualities are not finite. They are infinite in that they can’t be measured in a linear fashion, and a little hope with a dash of resilience goes a long way.

Just ask a Grandmother at her piano playing a timeless piece as she finds that still point in a turbulent world.

And by God, Robert Burns, the world could do with that ‘cup o’ kindness’ you wrote about in days gone by.

Steve