Ivory Coast

Horrid intrusions of the random serve as reminders of our condition in this pocket of existence. Some sixty people, many of them young, were crushed to death in a stampede in Abidjan, the capital of the Ivory Coast, as a fireworks event ended and people were heading home through narrow streets. Life is about meaning, but such events are a tremendous challenge to that intuitively felt conviction. It reminds me that, here, we’re not at home. We may be here for a purpose, but that that purpose is beyond the three dimensions moving through time. The sixty or sixty-one dead (the final number has not yet emerged), may be home now, or maybe not. Some may be born again; others have passed on.

The very setting and nature of this event—where we find it difficult to console ourselves by blaming somebody, where the victims were clearly innocent, just attending a festive event—underlines the precarious nature of our reality. It is illogical to assume that it was arranged, somehow, by divine sanction from above. At the human level, the event was massively policed; the disaster took place as the authorities relaxed; the actual triggering cause of it will probably never be discovered: just someone panicking.

But what needs remembering is that those sixty or more people—they are still with us, if invisibly. Their journey in this dimension may be over or may resume. What this realm of ours actually is, how it relates to the whole, that remains a subject of contemplation. But for the stout of heart such events serve as a corrective to the sleep that usually holds us. The lamps must be kept lit, the eyes must be kept open, even as we contemplate souls leaping out of crushed bodies somewhere in Africa. Our prayers go out to those they’ve left behind.