Jim Hopkins: There's no logic to world's behaviour

Minds touch. Comfort comes. Tears are the thoughts of the heart. Photo / Thinkstock

Bad things happen. That's it. There's no logic to it, no reason for it. There's no sense in it. If the world wants to shrug, it shrugs. Even that distorts the facts.

The world doesn't want to shrug. It's not a choice. Sometimes it shrugs. Most times it doesn't. But sometimes it does. It just does. That's it.

They think this planet's been here for four-and-a-half billion years. They know it's never stopped changing and never will. They think this planet has been our home for three or four million years. They know that 75 thousand years ago something happened which killed nearly all the people who were becoming us. They know we almost didn't make it.

They think there were about six million people alive 75 thousand years ago. They know a super volcano erupted. They know it pumped huge amounts of sulphur into the air. And they know where that volcano was.

It's now a lake in Indonesia, 100km long and 30km wide. They don't know how deep it is. But they know it changed the world's climate.

They know it changed the air we were breathing. They know it changed the land and the sea.

They think maybe 11,000 people survived what happened after that volcano erupted.

One day, the sun came up and six million people felt it warm their skin. Then 5,989,000 of those people died. And the sun came up again.

We can only imagine what those human people did and thought 75,000 years ago.

They had words. Maybe they had gods.

Between themselves and their words and their gods, they would have tried to make sense of it. They would have found reasons for the unreasonable. Because that's what we do. And they were us, on the way to being here.

So we know how they would have comforted themselves. They would have done what we do when we feel great joy or awful sadness. They would have touched. They would have hugged each other. They would have cried. They would have laughed.

It is in us to do these things. They are at the heart of who we are. Babies laugh before they speak. They cry before they can say why.

We feel before we think and there is a truth in feelings thought can never own. We make sense of things because we need to.

But the sense we make of things starts with what we feel. Love and grief are both marked with an embrace.

Minds touch. Comfort comes. Tears are the thoughts of the heart.

We know this because we have loved and grieved. We know our loves and our griefs are the measure of us. We know intensity is our essence because we were there when we felt it. We know it took us to more of ourselves and gave us more from ourselves than the numb tick of the ordinary ever will.

Like uranium, most of us live a half life most of the time.

Then there is love and then there is pain, with joy, exultant, unimagined, and sorrow, harsh and unimagined.

These are the times when we feel our hearts will burst or break. And these are the times we are most human.

Some of these times we bring to ourselves, they are of our choosing. But sometimes they just come because they have. They arrive and deal to us, whether we like it or not. And we deal with them, whether we like it or not.

We deal with them as we can, because we must. It's in our marrow. That much we have inherited from those 11,000 survivors 75,000 years ago.

In fact, we've inherited everything from them, but it's the capacity to deal with bad things when bad things need to be dealt with that matters most right now.

It's easy to be complicated. It's hard to be simple. But every complicated thing is really very simple. It just is.

In his novel, God bless you, Mr Rosewater, Kurt Vonnegut's hero, Eliot Rosewater, is a volunteer fireman. And he has a simple motto. "Goddam it, you've got to be kind."

We do. Everything's there, including the irony of the first two words. That's what it is. We've got to be kind. We should always be kind.

Every day. But we've got to be kind when the days are bad and the world has shrugged because it does. Then it's the option that isn't.

No one is alone. We've all felt a pain or fear or love more fierce than we imagined.

That is what binds us. What's happening to others has happened to us, even if it hasn't.

The best things and the worst things are universal. We will heal. We know we will because we have to. And we will repair the damage. We will fix what's broken. Because we do.

We will put our heads to the task of making things better because we have put our hearts in our heads first.