Yourself?

Mechanism

Hmm, today just heard that one of our lecturers lost her husband to the SARS episode. Yet she still gave us a wonderful series of lectures. I wonder what it's like to be her. To have to go on alone.

I guess we all understand the risks of our profession. But it never occurs to us that we might be one of the unlucky few percent to realize the risks. Even though we know, that there may be a 50% chance we might die (or some other figure), life is not fair. 50% of the population experience 100% of the risk. We can't all share the burden of death, we can't all be half dead.

This is the inequality of life. We can try to mitigate the impact of that with numbers, ratios, proportions, odds. But it hurts to know that some are lucky, and some are not. Even though we might all want to be equal, can we truly be equal when chance takes sides?

It's the same with us. We're the people chance has favoured, and it's our duty to hold our heads up high with the spoils of life. But we're not lucky in all things all the time. We aren't the top 5% in everything. There are times when we are stuck with the tragedies, times when we aren't exactly lucky. But we're the top 5%. We have to deal with the worst 5% with the strength that is expected of us, when what we really want is to fall and be comforted like the other 95%.

We can't.

We can't fail because we are the dreams of 95% of the population. We are the actors on a stage where the aspirations of an entire population fall upon. We can't appear weak, we can't take a break, we can't appear to waver.

So what does that leave us?

We have no exit. We have no retreat. We have no rest. More than anything, we become the cogs of society, the ones that have to keep moving, have to keep churning, have to keep up appearances. We're not irreplacable, we're not superhuman. But we do make the tradeoffs for the rest of you. So that you won't have to experience what we do.

posted by Downhere. @ 11:09 am