This is an interesting perspective that was actually written a few years ago for the CSM, and I found it on my Christian Left page on FB. I have actually been through something like this many years ago. I was young and left my apartment in the middle of the night. It was a domestic situation rather than a fire, but same sort of thing. Sometimes you don't even have time to think about what "stuff" you want to take. You take your purse/wallet and get the hell out. See what you think -
Santa Barbara, Calif.
<snip>
At one point, I noticed my BlackBerry blinking at me. I saw I had five missed calls from my husband Ryan. And two messages. That's not like him. I stepped outside to call him; he sounded strange.
The news was dire. A huge fire had broken out in the foothills of Montecito, which we can see from our porch. The Santa Ana winds, blowing uncharacteristically late in the season – and particularly ferociously – combined with unseasonably hot temperatures, and my town was in flames, my street under evacuation. Those winds change direction unpredictably; there was no way to know if we'd be OK. Ryan had corralled the cat and the dog, and wanted to know what to take from the house. I said I'd let him know.
Back inside, I downloaded the news. Jenny, a left-brained attorney with control freak tendencies, whipped out a notepad and pen. "Let's make a list," she said.
I just sat there.
"Paperwork," she said, mainly to herself. "Pictures. Journals. Heirlooms? Jewelry? Do you have a 'stuff box?'" I could swear she even asked me if I had any doilies. Doilies?
Another friend, asked, "What about your passport?"
"Yeah," I said, munching on some pita. Jenny wrote it down.
The three of them exchanged looks. "She's handling it really well," somebody said to someone else.
Finally, I looked up. "It's so ironic," I said. Jenny put down her pen. With thoughts of New Orleans stirred up from the book reading, there I sat, on the brink of losing everything.
Ultimately, my passport was all I came up with for Jenny's list. Later, I thought of this, amused at my logic. So, in case my house burned down, I'd be able to get out of the country? But in the face of disaster and with no time to prepare, how do you choose? What do you take? At the end of the day, isn't it all just junk?
<snip>
I realize those who lost everything are likely feeling anything but calm, anything but comfort. And yet. That moment had something to teach me. This culture, encouraging us to accumulate, to upgrade, telling us there is no such thing as enough, may be responsible for its own undoing.
And maybe the gift of disaster, of floods, of fires, of unprecedented economic unraveling, is the opportunity to start over – and to do it differently.
• Shannon Kelley is a columnist at the Santa Barbara Independent. She is also a freelance writer.
Read the entire piece here:
http://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/Opinion/2009/0109/p09s02-coop.html