I hate tragedies.

Nobody feels any pain
Tonight as I stand inside the rain
Ev'rybody knows
That Baby's got new clothes
But lately I see her ribbons and her bows
Have fallen from her curls.
Oh she takes just like a woman
Oh and she makes love just like a woman
Oh and she aches just like a woman
But she breaks just like a little girl.


- Jeff Buckley, Just Like A Woman.

I absolutely loathe the cruelty of life sometimes.

I recently stumbled across Jeff Buckley, through several YouTube videos (as many of us do), and under the video, saw RIP JEFF. After a Wikipedia search, I found that he died in his early thirties when going for a recreational dive in a river - something he'd done before - only a tug boat came by this time. He wasn't on recreational drugs. He didn't feel suicidal or depressed.

He was simply in the wrong place, at the wrong time.

It makes my chest ache when people die, even more so when you think of how unique and talented they were, or could've been. To think of how their path has come to an end. I guess the fragility of life is something that I will probably learn to grasp over the next few years studying Medicine at university. But hearing about how doctors eventually learn to accept death, feeling nothing...I'm not sure how I feel about that. I suppose time will tell.

It's saddening to think that some people get up one day, leaving their homes, not knowing what will happen. Not knowing that what you said to a someone that morning would be your last conversation. I am angered at myself and at others, when we see the news on TV, when hundreds die in another part of the world, or someone goes missing, and we just accept it, before changing the channel over the watch a film. How we've become desensitised to what we see. Why, I wonder? A self defense mechanism? Or perhaps people have stopped caring.


I hope it is not the latter.


To anyone reading this, I ask you to spend a moment to think of those who are lost from the world every day and to be thankful for what you have - for the people in your lives. Or if you're sitting there, thinking of how you have nobody, I ask you to break from the monotony of life's routine. Live, to never regret.

After all, you have no excuse. Where are your shackles?

Additional note: here's the link to Jeff Buckley's - Just Like A Woman http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=isYhMK3tP0c. You won't be wasting your time.