It’s all small stuff: A week to treasure the precious gifts of life and family
We can get caught up in petty political dramas or we can hold our dear ones closer. This week was a reminder not to sweat the small stuff, writes Madonna King
We don’t know, first-hand, the distress of those small children now left orphaned by Sunday morning’s NSW wedding tragedy.
And we can only imagine the difficult conversations behind those little people finding out how sharply their lives have changed.
The futures of their parents too, lost in an instant as nightfall and fog closed in on revellers who had just witnessed the promise of a lifetime.
A doctor. A husband and wife who beam out from photographs, while holding hands. A group of athletes whose trim and toned bodies showed how they cared for themselves, and probably others. A mother and a daughter, now bound together in life, and death. The list goes on.
And a father, hidden behind his hoodie, weeping. The wedding bus driver, Brett Button. Another image, ramming home the point that life can change in an instant.
From a promise of forever, to death. From riches to ruins. Success to failure. Good fortune to bad. Rosy health to terminal illness. From photographs of a newly-married couple, smiling with the dreams of a joint future ahead, to newspaper headlines and photographs of a broken bus, and broken lives, many will remember forever.
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It shouldn’t take a wedding tragedy to teach us how uncertain life really is: how a knock on the door can change the lives of an L plater’s family; or how a phone call from another country can deliver news that will change a family and community forever.
This week has been an awful, awful reminder of that.
The death of a gorgeous young Brisbane adventurer in Canada. It must be utterly unfathomable to anyone who knew her. The death of a father in the suburbs, allegedly at the hands of his own son. A missing child. A wife, brutally assaulted.
And almost 200 lives, stolen by Covid in Australia, just in the past week.
No matter where the truth might lie, a single night out in a Canberra pub and what happened next served as the opening chapter for how the lives of Brittany Higgins and Bruce Lehrmann – and so many others – have changed, forever.
Ben Roberts-Smith is almost certainly now rueing that single moment, when he decided to take the media to court, citing defamation of his character. If he’d turned the other cheek, how different the story might be.
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One decision, that can change a life or lives forever, in amongst the 35,000-odd decisions academics believe we make in any one day.
This week, headlined by the wedding bus tragedy, is a salient reminder of that.
And the effect it’s had has travelled through the week as a wallpaper of stories and arguments about budgets and who said what to whom and when play out in Parliament.
Sunday made me turn off from all of that; that wallpaper that covers our lives with news.
A former US president appearing in court seemed almost ho-hum. But the discovery that four children had been found alive after a plane crash in the Amazon jungle 40 days ago filled my heart.
Sometimes you’ve got to go looking for the good things in life.
The State budget which needs to be dissected and analysed looks like more wallpaper, splashed on an old building to spruce it up. Or in political terms, a bucket full of money has been thrown at voters which its architects hope will be enough to secure the government another term.
Like all budgets, there are winners and losers. But like all budgets, in recent years, it is full of short-term, please-reelect-me promises, and free of the big strong ideas that will navigate our futures.
Could Labor’s Gough Whitlam have really navigated social housing policy in the contemporary climate? Could John Howard have forged ahead with gun laws in 2023?
It seems unlikely. Governments, of all persuasions now, are fighting for the small-target status where their aim is to disappoint as few voters as possible. Treading gently, so they don’t lose votes at an election down the track.
But this week should teach us otherwise. To live and laugh and love. To think big. To be daring in our public policy and brave in our private lives. Because we know it could all be taken away in a nanosecond.
