Putting into perspective post-earthquake

I was having a rather smooth and quiet work day in the office, going through reports and reading up work related news (I don’t read news in general). Then I felt the shaking, not strong but noticeable. I lost count how many earthquakes I encountered since we moved to Asia, so I didn’t lose my calm. I realized that I was on 12th floor, as opposed to 32th floor when we lived in Manila, so the shake is probably less strong. Yet, it lasted almost 90 seconds, and colleagues (just few on Monday) came out of the office, trying to confirm with others that this was indeed an earthquake. One of the lady kind of freaked out, probably her first earthquake experience. The sense of lack of control is the worse part. Then another colleague who remained calm tried to comfort her, that our building is built against earthquake, the fact that is moving is a good thing as it is built for that purpose to go with the movement. I’m not sure how assured she felt, but the calming voice probably helped more.

Then 5:30pm, we all got together in preparation for a meeting next morning (last minute change of schedule, causing a bit of stress). One of the team members said: you know… this is good enough given the change of schedule (10 hours earlier than originally planned) and that we just all survived an earthquake. Why should we “kill” ourselves for JUST a report? We just had an EARTHQUAKE, for God’s sake. He’s absolutely right.

In day-to-day life, we get stressed by minor things because that’s the only annoyance we have that day. Yet, they are minor relative to other big events like natural disasters. 60 people died, over 300 got injured due to the earthquake. We should all be grateful to be still breathing and lost zero belongings, right?