The Role & Value of Shocks

Trans-Africa adventure cyclist Peter Gostelow, peddling from the UK to Cape Town, was attacked on the Corniche early last Saturday night by five guys, two brandishing machetes. They got his camera, credit card, some cash, and left him with nasty cuts to his wrist and foot, one requiring surgery to reattach three severed tendons. His trip is on hold as he convelesces with us over the next few weeks.

Note Peter's recollection of the event here.

While there have been a few relatively isolated attacks this year, the one with Peter appears to be the most dramatic, and it has rippled through the ISD and expat community. Senegal continues to be a safe country in which to travel, though it's advisable to use precaution after dark in particular areas.

Life offers shocks -- sudden and unexpected loss. Our pictures of ourselves are wrinkled, or singed; our bubbles are punctured, with a loss of pressure. The psychological consequence is a sense of emptiness, depletion, depression -- a loss of self. We feel shredded, disemboweled. Anyone who has experienced the death of a love one knows this well. The sensations reach to the core of our being.

But this disequilibrium tends not to last. Unlike Humpty-Dumpty, we are put back together again, hopefully in a better way. If we imagine the persons we wish to be, those qualities can become incorporated into our reintegrating psyche, or so I imagine.

Life offers shocks, and in those moments we are melted down. The shocks can be very strong solvents. For a few moments we are what we are without the mask. We are, perhaps, more essentially ourselves, and less identified with our balloon-animal, broad-smiling false personalities. In this way, shocks are very important to our development and understanding. Rather than run from them, we should pause in those moments when we feel least ourselves and try to remember them.