Marilyn Stowe Blog

Mother Nature wins the upper hand…

The Scottish singer KT Tunstall described Nature as “An obviously omnipotent force with the upper hand”, and ourselves as “Only guests. As long as we are graceful appreciative lodgers, the earth remains healthy and wondrous”.

She is right. Nature, if angered, has the power to wipe out a civilisation and paralyse established ways of life for millions of people. Nature is timeless, majestic, and unbearably beautiful, but at will it can become the most ruthless of all our enemies.

Natural disasters remind just how powerful and indiscriminate it can be, with hurricanes, typhoons, floods, earthquakes and volcanoes transforming peoples’ lives in an instant.

I thought this a few weeks ago, when I was looking at Mount Vesuvius from my hotel in Capri. You couldn’t miss the brooding mountain: it loomed out of the mists, across the bay of Naples. It was a constant reminder of what had happened when it erupted thousands of years ago. Any visitor to Pompeii cannot fail to be horrified by the way it destroyed an entire population and its way of life, leaving only a terrible legacy in its wake.

Already I have heard from some of my clients about how they were affected by the recent Icelandic volcano eruption. As ash rose into the sky, the world had to stand still as flights were grounded. In this space age century, an erupting volcano on a tiny island in the most northerly part of the northern hemisphere wreaked havoc on the entire globe…

One of my clients and his family were in glamorous Dubai when the flights were grounded. The holiday over and unable to return to the UK, they were obliged to pay increased room rates every day their stay extended. With no end in sight, and hotels swamped with people desperate for a room, tempers were fraying and arguments began. Luckily my client has a home in Jordan and the family took a flight, which was unaffected by the ash cloud, to Amman. There they waited in the comfort of their own home for a flight back to the UK.  In this instance relationships reverted to normal, the stress was over and the family survived intact.

Not everyone was so fortunate.

Another client discovered to his horror that his company had taken advantage of his enforced holiday by moving to oust him as he was trapped abroad. By the time he returned, he had no job left. His belongings were made available to collect from the front desk of his office.

One of my other clients and her husband were on holiday in America when the ash cloud began. The husband managed to book the last remaining first class seat on a plane back to the UK before flights were grounded. He left his wife and three children there, booking them into a lower grade hotel to save money. Two weeks later, when the family finally reached the UK, it emerged that the husband had rushed home to spend time with his mistress.  His wife instructed me to divorce him the following day.

But the ash cloud produced a happy ending too. One of my clients had become estranged from his son during his divorce, and had taken him to South America on holiday. They ended up spending an additional, fun-packed week there, cementing their bond.

I imagine there are many people out there who were affected by the ash cloud and have learned first-hand that we are but “guests of Mother Nature”.  In a funny way incidents like the ash cloud crisis give us an opportunity to stop and focus on what is important in our lives, and the personal relationships that define them. Even though there is no guarantee that we will always like what we find!

Image credit: VesselaDukova.