Photography And Half-Thoughts By Mitchell Hegman

...because some of it is pretty and some of it is not.

Sunday, October 3, 2010

Staggering Along the Tracks

I recall from a few years ago the tragic death of a very young mother. We call such episodes untimely and try our best to fashion sense and reason around the sad event. We loathe considering that randomness or the lack of any grand design might account for most wrong and right circumstance. Chance? Dumb luck? That, friends and neighbors, we shall leave behind for dogs and cats. We are of superior stuff. We have invented hundreds of gods and religions and philosophical “isms” in efforts to bring purpose to bear more of the awkward load that seems upon us.
 
While discussing the passing of this young mother—victim of an annihilating cancer—and lamenting the difficult times ahead for her young husband and small children, the person with whom I was talking remarked: “Well, I guess God had more use for a good mother than we did.”
What logic brings this to our table? Instantly, I thought of three or four families in need of a good mother—including the one just vacated. I call statements such as these half-logics. They leave me a bit cold. Armed with this statement, might we conclude that God required a drunk, and that is why one perished after being struck by a train while staggering along the tracks late at night? Might we conclude that God needed the train filled with hapless souls that plunged down a ravine to their deaths below?

Not that I object entirely to seeking or accepting the possibility of some manner of grand design at work behind the stars shuffling overtop us at night, behind the mathematical cascades knitting things together below the surface of both stone and palm frond. And, perhaps, something bigger knows the value of a ten-year drought. But are we only fooling ourselves to think that a Herford calf born with seven legs and the blind child are anything beyond happenstance?

--Mitchell Hegman

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