She pursed her lips. He bit his. The news was not good.
Heavy breathing followed, chest heaving, air raspingly sucked in and expelled through quivering nostrils – hers.
He . . . he turned away as if to hide something. And in truth, he wanted to conceal the flitting eyes, the beginnings of tears that for him were not marks of a man, the general panic in his being.
A moment’s eerie quiet.
Then her handbag fell to the floor. And she began a sob that became a wail, and others joined in a chorus of mourning.
In the dizzying whirl of thoughts, tomorrow was a forbidding spectre. It loomed out of a hazy, engulfing fog in which children’s uncertain eyes stared and bellies growled and yesterday’s comfort had morphed into pain . . .
Loss. Wuhloss.
Jobs gone.
This new year finds many not so much in pursuit of resolutions as in need of resolve.
These are, indeed, tough times.
When the going gets tough, the tough get going, we suggest earnestly. Tough times never last, but tough people do, we mouth too.
We call them adages, axioms, saws, proverbs. Less charitably: platitudes, bromides. Sometimes it is like we have them coming out not just our mouths and pens but our ears. Oh, we are a quoting species.
“What lies behind you and what lies in front of you pales in comparison to what lies inside of you.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson.
“Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater. Possession pampers the mind; privation trains and strengthens it.” – William Hazlitt.
“The true test of a person character is how they stand during test of adversity.” – Unknown.
“Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.” – Helen Keller.
Life has a way many times of making our expressed words and oh-so-confident thoughts, even if unuttered, come back to challenge us, if not haunt us.
So an interesting thing is happening with Barbadians now – we of the many quotes.
The spoken air is filled with despondency and weakness, against all our vaunted words.
Forlornness
Here we are buffeted by the strong winds of an economic storm – and despite all that we would say in fair weather, the overwhelming response has been a sense of forlornness.
Look, lemme be perfectly clear. Unless it is with a glimpse of retirement, no working man or woman relishes the prospect of not having a job tomorrow. For some, understandably, that births a tailspin of bleak despair.
But while the faithless might have sneered, Anglican Bishop John Holder and Roman Catholic Bishop of Bridgetown-Kingstown Jason Gordon urged a positive view of our present knotty place. They both reminded, in essence, “God is still with us”, meaning, I think, that there is great hope even in the midst of this difficulty.
More sayings, some might say.
But I think that along with biblical “manna”, there is the substance of prevailing, because religious conviction aside, I believe in the hardiness of the human spirit, in the resourcefulness of man – qualities that show that in straitened circumstances time and time again we have the stuff.
Yuh know what, too? There is always the likelihood that there are some igrant people who feel that yuh downplaying people’s plight when you say something like, “When life hands you lemons, make lemonade.”
But their pessimism and misapprehension run up against story after story (not fictions) of man’s clawing himself out of pits of adversity.
And those who paint all dark and gloom are not friends of the unfortunate.
We depend on those around us to bolster us when things go south. But from secular mouths and pens, where are the words of resilience?
Cries of utter despair are the understandable, instinctive responses of a sufferer today – not of those around, who must be a support system when the worst comes to the worst.
But this pessimism in the ranks . . . . It is clear that we have been near-blighted by a sense of entitlement to things that are not givens in any real world.
I know, too, that increasingly, deficit thinking has become the almost default response to trouble, whether it is troubled youth or troubling times.
We see ourselves as in a hole out of which blame is the only route – with a corollary seeking to punish or simply to get back what is our “due”. Never to both inbuild something that turns adversity into strength-generation and develop greater fortitude to meet future challenges.
But for those in the present no-job distress, we must aid the thrust for the aeroplane in Henry Ford’s hopeful advice: “When everything seems to be going against you, remember that the aeroplane takes off against the wind, not with it.”
Of course, we must give tangible help where we can. But we must, too, inspire that lift, that sense of their own resilience, for the presently grounded.
Overcoming is in the human DNA.
• Sherwyn Walters is a writer who became a teacher, a song analyst, a broadcaster and an editor. Email offwally@gmail.com.