I’m utterly amazed by the impact that an April 14th eruption of an Icelandic volcano has had on the world.
As everybody knows, the cloud of ash that’s risen from this improbable little island has grounded about 100, 000 flights across the world. Forget for a moment about the commercial and economic consequence of this event, and simply consider the personal.
Millions of people had their lives altered. Stranded in airports and cities and countries not of their choosing, people were marooned from their lives, ceding to an authority that they’d never even imagined existed, and discovering in that, that the world they inhabited was not one that they had shaped.
Lovers were kept apart–the aching hours they spent waiting for one another stretching from days to weeks. Other people, now with something fresh and big in common, found love in unexpected corridors. A donated organ didn’t make it in time for one person, but did for somebody else. A man in a hat got religion, and a wife, who had been determined to end her marriage, decided after a week to give it another chance. A girl that was about to be fired from he job was given a reprieve, never to discover just how close she had come. A wedding was missed, and somebody who was loved, died without their family nearby.
This is just the twisting and turning of life, I know, but for whatever reason this particular circumstance seemed to throw into stark relief just how interconnected things are, and how we’re subject to destinies we never could have predicted. There’s an implicit potential in all things, and one action, no matter how small or mundane we might imagine it, can drift out into the world and change everything.
The above video is of the Sigur Ros song Glosoli and it is beautiful.