yesterday night in melbourne at nearly 11pm, there was a reported tremor felt by residents across melbourne. the tremor measured 4.6 on the richter scale, with its epicentre located 90km southeast of melbourne.

i was happily preparing to go out of my room to a friend's new building apartment to watch slumdog millionaire (fantastic show), and when i opened the door several of my neighbours were standing in the corridor while a few more were poking their heads out their doors. a tutor was also standing there, and they were all slightly panicked, saying that they felt the ground shake. our floor tutor also hurried across from his room after feeling it. suffice to say that i was clueless about this, maybe i have my head in the clouds and feet off the ground half the time that i missed the shocking tremor felt by everyone on my floor, and nearly everyone in IH.

but anyways, this incident somehow reminds me of how precarious the world that we live on is. everything we've built up over the years, skyscrapers, shopping malls, business districts, houses and homes, or on a personal level, lives, careers and relationships, could so easily be destroyed so many ways by the forces of nature. one day you could be rushing off to work, or making breakfast, or doing a number 2 in the washroom and the next instant a major earthquake, flood or bushfire wipes out your entire life as you know it, causing irreparable damage to your world. and again this in turn reminds me of how insignificant we all are.

do the natural phenomena CARE whether you've spent nearly all your life savings on that house which just collapsed in the earthquake? do they care that your loved ones mean the world to you if they ever perish in a tsunami? do they even bother to step back and reflect one moment that the crops which produce the food you survive on were razed in a wildly spreading bushfire?

we should not, for even one instance, forget that we lead fragile lives in a volatile world, and that living for one more day is a lucky roll of a dice in an all-encompassing game.