The wise and wondrous weight of words

Words reach us through poems, songs, classrooms, holy books, love letters, parental lectures, and they touch and transform us through our lives.

- Rohit Brijnath

The wallet was brown, weathered, undistinguished. It held insufficient currency notes, a tattered phone diary, a dried flower (who gave it to me, I can't remember) but also words. They were printed on a piece of A4 paper, folded and faded and tucked into a compartment.

I lived then in India and what was on the paper had occurred in Washington. In January 1982, a plane had crashed and fallen into the freezing Potomac River. Only a few people survived the tragedy, yet a remarkable act took place in the water. Rescue was difficult till a helicopter appeared and a flotation ring was dropped to the survivors. Incredibly, one man kept passing the lifeline to the next person. And then to another. Again and again.

When the helicopter finally came back for him, he was gone.

In Time magazine, Roger Rosenblatt wrote an extraordinary essay—the man's name was not yet known—titled Man In The Water. It was about heroism, man and nature, and the possibility within all of us. In his final paragraph, Rosenblatt wrote this:

"The odd thing is that we do not even really believe that the man in the water lost his fight. 'Everything in Nature contains all the powers of Nature,' said Emerson. Exactly. So the man in the water had his own natural powers. He could not make ice storms, or freeze the water until it froze the blood. But he could hand life over to a stranger, and that is a power of nature too. The man in the water pitted himself against an implacable, impersonal enemy; he fought it with charity; and he held it to a standoff. He was the best we can do."

It is this essay that rested in my wallet in the 1980s for a long while. A lesson in my back pocket on selflessness but also writing. Every now and then the paper was unfolded and the words inhaled.