Watership Down
When i was little i read this book Watership Down. It looked like a story about these cute little bunny rabbits searching for the perfect home. They also turned it into an animated movie that could have been Disney. It was actually pretty gruesome. It begins when a bunch of rabbits are forced to flee their homes when a farmer gases their warren. Always in some kind of mortal danger, they journey far to search for a new home, looking for a kind of Utopia - where there are green fields, not too many predators, no humans and no enemies.
Finally, they reach one place where it seems like they have found it. They join a community of rabbits in what seems like the perfect place. There's an abundance of food, the rabbits are fat, healthy and lazy, it's the easy life. But there was also something that made everyone a liitle nervous, a little jittery. something unspoken and under the surface. One day, one of the rabbits was just gone - like plucked out and disappeared. It turned out that these were farmed rabbits and every once in a while, one would be quietly taken and cooked for dinner. That was the price they paid for such an idyllic life. Well, in the book our original group of rabbits decide this is not the place for them and they continue their search for the perfect home in the hills.
I've often thought of this scene in all kinds of moments throughout my life. Like, whenever something seems really good, there is always this one sinister thing, that everyone just tries to ignore, but it's there lurking. This one price you have to pay.
Examples include living in Israel. Once in a while a rocket will land or a bus will explode or a soldier will fall, but that is the price we pay and we just pray it doesn't happen to us. That we're not that one, singled out, picked from a crowd, this time.
Cancer is also kind of like that thing in our lives. Or even death. It's ALWAYS around us. People are cut down, rubbed out, one to the left of us, one to the right of us, sometimes if it's a family member, right in the middle of us. And then it becomes a horror story. But the rest of the world just keeps on ticking. we go on and death again becomes invisible, happening quickly and then it's over. Old people tucked away behind closed doors of hospices for a period of time to slip away. We bury our dead quickly, we try to return to life as quickly as possible. And i'm not saying these are bad things. I'm just saying that it's weird how we forget how fragile life is. We're dangling on this frail little string and in any second, a pair of invisble scissors can just snip it. But we have to act like those scissors aren't there. Like our jobs and our plans and our running around matters. like we've got to hurry up and get things done. which we do. really. but it's weird.