The calamity that comes is never the one we had prepared ourselves for.
– Mark Twain, Letter to Olivia Clemens, August 16, 1896

I woke up at quarter past five, as I usually do, yet with the first hints of a headache and a sore throat, only wanting a hot cup of coffee. I grabbed my phone and stumbled into the bathroom, as I usually do, fumbling to turn off the alarm before it had a chance to go off and then touching the icon that will pull up my emails, the emails that have come to me during the night as I slept. I was inundated with mentions on Facebook, each tag coming to me via email, inundated with private messages sliding down the face of my phone in blue and white. “What’s going on?” I thought, the oddest things rushing through my sleepy brain. And I tapped the first one to see what was what.

“What happened in Paris?” I burst out of the bathroom trying desperately to understand the messages lighting up my screen. Something happened in Paris! Attentats! Jean-Pierre rolled over and grabbed his own phone. “It was bound to happen, we all knew it. It was only a matter of when.” And he began scrolling through the French news alerts as I flicked open Facebook.

Horror and shock followed quickly by a deep, painful sadness. I am a peaceful person, hoping naively that people can live side by side in tolerance and understanding. An ideal world, I know, that doesn’t exist. When something like this, terrorism, an act of pure evil, happens, evil, pain, death inflicted on humans by other humans (fellow humans) for no reason at all, I, like each of you, experience an overwhelming, raging profusion of emotions. We feel heartbroken, utter sadness, anger, frustration. We feel naked and vulnerable and helpless. Our hearts swell with grief and pain, love and compassion for the victims; our hearts swell with indignation and hate against the perpetrators of such unthinkable, heinous acts. We sit glued to the television, ears pressed to the radio to follow the events.

We all, each one of us, try and make sense of it. Some twist it all around and politicize it. Others turn it on its head and spew hate and intolerance, something – being hateful and intolerant – they who perpetrate these killings do, the very things that horrify us. We cannot allow ourselves to become the very thing that we despise, the very thing that we are condemning! We must hold on to our humanity, our compassion, tolerance, and love. We may be dizzy with empathy, sadness, anger, horror, and confusion, but I know that none of us want to lose ourselves in gross generalizations, to forgo that which makes us better than they.

Breakfast carried on as usual, yet the mood was subdued, the diningroom hushed but for the crackling and spitting of the fire, the darkness of the morning seeping in through the windowpanes tainting the normally cosy ambiance just this side of grim. Our guests sat quietly eating, sipping coffee or tea, and scrolling through the news and messages on their telephones. Laughter, when it did come, seemed oddly out of place yet a relief, that sign of life. We, after all, were still here, and needed that confirmation, like pinching oneself. We stood in the kitchen and whispered about Paris as we organized the day ahead of us. And we were thankful for the mundane, those little things, the gardening, making jam, chatting with my sons, serving wine to our guests in the late afternoon, the warmth of the day that finally dawned for us, the workaday, earthly things that kept us tethered to the here and now and allowed us, for just a few minutes here and there, to forget what had happened the evening before. To forget that it was so very close.

We here in France carry on even as we grieve. We move through our days with smiles on our faces yet feeling changed, different, empty, as if we have lost a loved one. We accept that this was a one-time event, yet know that it can happen again anywhere. But everything, life, keeps going on. And it must! Because we are, and should be, driven forward by hope, not by fear. And by naively hoping that people can begin to live side-by-side in tolerance and understanding.