By Emily Stonehouse

Sometimes it all feels too much.

That weight of the world. Anger settles on the chests of the everyday person. We feel every taut and pull of conflict, so deeply in our hearts.

Until we can’t take it anymore. These feelings. So we add bricks to our wall; higher and higher until those feelings are blocked. Forbidden from going in or out. Trapped in a comfortably numb setting because those wisps of vulnerability carve too deep.

We jog through our siloed lives, nose deep in the monotonous scroll that’s nothing more than a bandaid solution to our innate crave for connection.

But when disaster strikes, when the dam breaks, our walls are forced to crumble. Those bricks we’ve meticulously placed in an effort to protect our feelings are knocked to the ground, and we are left with a skeleton of dust.

The rawness of being human suddenly floats to the surface of our existence, and we question our very basic needs; the ones that live in that core we’ve kept trapped for so long.

When I entered the warming centre in Minden, all I could smell was soup. Potato soup, to be exact. Homemade by volunteers and municipal staff in the kitchen of the S.G. Nesbitt Arena.

As I was arriving, a family had just pulled in behind me. At this point, for many, it had been a week without power.

And that doesn’t just mean they couldn’t flick on a light switch.

It meant that food had rotted in their fridges. That heat was a thing of the past. That connection to the outside world was sliced and diced and gone. That electric hearing aids and wheelchairs and medical necessities were toast. It meant they were struggling.

A hot shower. A warm meal. A human connection.

It’s amazing how that recipe is the fuel for another day. For the energy to move forward. To start again.

When these disasters strike, I am often overwhelmed by the vulnerability of being human. That at our very cores, the ones we keep bundled and bandaged for fear of pain, we are all so very similar. A hot shower. A warm meal. A human connection.

There is goodness in people. I need that reminder.

Sometimes daily.

It is a world of give and take, of buy and trade. We give something to get something, we push so we can pull.

But on a rainy Saturday, it wasn’t give and take, push and pull.

It was potato soup. It was warm showers. It was humans, being the best versions of humans they can be.

Minden Hills showed up for their people. The County of Haliburton jumped in to help. Others followed suit, from all across this great country. Exactly what a community – of any size –  should be doing, through thick and thin, push and pull.

Because natural disasters have a way of flattening us. Not just from a physical and infrastructural sense. But as humans. They level the playing field, they knock us down, they keep it even. They serve as our reminders that at our very core, we are nothing more than human.

Complicated and simple, flawed and perfect, abstract and clear cut. Humans. Who have a craving for a hot shower. A warm meal. A human connection.

For those times, when it all feels too much.