Lessons from a painful loss

It’s past midnight in Los Angeles, California, and I can’t sleep. When I turned on my phone this afternoon as I landed in LAX I had a message from my wife. It was late in Paris, and she was in tears: she was watching Notre Dame’s cathedral burning on TV.

I was in shock, like most of the country. I’m not French but I’ve been living in Paris’s outskirts for 20 years. I’ve been browsing the media and it’s not only France, but the whole world that’s mourning.

Why have millions experienced this sadness when watching the footage of that old building in flames? Of course this is not just any building: it’s an icon, a symbol of French history, culture and beauty. But there is more to it than the value that you can give to that church. All things considered, Parisians have gone through a lot lately, from terrorist attacks to street riots, so one may think they’d have more important things to worry about. Let alone people in distant countries.

When it comes to iconic cultural heritage, there is more than artistic or religious significance. It’s also their uniqueness that makes such places and objects priceless. It’s that we know that they are irreplaceable.

We must always strive to learn from tragedy and this is what I take away from this one. We in the safety trade must use these two levers to develop safety attitudes and ultimately a culture of safety. First of all, people’s values and the affective bonds that link them with the things and persons that matter to them. But also the fundamental beliefs on the fragility and irreplaceability of those things and persons.

We need to nurture these two aspects if we want people to care and to behave in a safe way.