the Unexplainable

Trey Smith

A 7-year-old boy was recovering on Sunday after a tornado sheared off the walls of his North Carolina home, snatched him from his bed and threw him 350 feet onto the embankment of a nearby interstate, the boy's grandmother told Reuters.

Jamal Stevens suffered only minor injuries from the Friday twister that demolished his family's two-story home in Charlotte near Interstate 485, where Jamal was found by his family a few minutes after the twister struck his neighborhood.
~ from Reuters ~

A toddler who was found alive in a field in tornado-ravaged southeastern Indiana after her parents and two siblings were killed when a twister struck their mobile home died on Sunday of her injuries, her family said.

Angel Babcock had been in critical condition in a Kentucky hospital since Friday, when the 15-month-old was found near her family's destroyed mobile home in New Pekin, Indiana.
~ from Reuters ~

As these two articles underscore, we don't know why some individuals escape physically unscathed from calamity, while others succumb to death. I'm sure we've each read or heard stories about horrific accidents like a plane crash in which the person in Seat 8B lives, while her compatriots in Seats 8A & 8C perish.

At times, we can pinpoint after the fact the specific variables that made all the difference in the world; most of the time, however, we have nary a clue. The results appear so random. Since the randomness seems so unexplainable, we struggle to find some sort of rationale to hang our hat on. In our society, the most common hat hooks are God, karma, fate and blind luck.

As I've written many times before, I believe that, if we could pull back far enough, we could trace the multitude of variables and almost nothing, if anything, would be random. The fact is, however, the human mind can only pull back so far and it isn't anywhere near far enough. We are constrained by the very subjective nature of the human brain.

And so, the best we often can do is to say that a result is unexplainable. For most people, that sort of rationale offers little comfort and solace. And, I grant, it doesn't offer the majority much in the way of soothing the pain of loss.