Yes, I know. I’ve been a bit grim lately.
The odd thing is that in my day to day life, I’m really quite happy. Portland has been welcoming, we’ve got a great house, 100 years old this year, in a cool corner of the city’s NE area, and despite Portland’s reputation as a hellhole in some quarters, we’ve got nothing to complain about. My stateside daughter, son in law and now 1-year-old granddaughter live less than two blocks away, and life is generally quite grand.
It’s the big bad world outside our calm corner that’s the issue.
How to find the balance between these two discordant realities?
Everyone seems to have different answers. Many people I follow on Facebook — including actual friends and close relatives, along with many acquaintances and friends of friends — appear to live bifurcated lives, traveling, enjoying nature, spending time with families and friends, and only occasionally (in recent times) paying much attention to the plight of the planet, the sad decline of comity, community and just plain decency in this country, and the winds of war rattling windows and shaking up seemingly settled situations, all at once and in many places at once.
I realize that many people now post only happy news and happy thoughts online, and that’s possibly better than during the darkest days of the Trump era (or is it the first Trump era?), when many people regularly howled with anger and disbelief at the insanity around them. I was one of them, and it didn’t seem to help the world or my own mental health to rage against fate, the state of the nation and the deep, existential threats facing all of us from Climate Change and other dangers.
The threats kept growing, despite my angst. The nation kept unraveling.
I spend a lot of time now writing for several local newsletters and trying, in my own small way, to help build community and environmental awareness in my neighborhood and more broadly. This helps, for sure. So does using this blog as a sounding board for occasional rambling essays and somewhat more common attempts to capture my thoughts and emotions in something resembling poetry.
I know it’s not enough, but what is?
Art, philosophy, religion, history, family, friends. Those are the traditional baliwicks in times like these (not that anyone has truly seen times like these, when nature itself is being devastated, but hold that thought).
Oh and drink, of course, or drugs, or random sex. Of those, I sometimes indulge in the first. As A.E. Houseman put it so eloquently, “malt does more than Milton can / to justify God’s ways to man.”
But alas, no amount of wine or whiskey can truly help.
My good friend Steven E. F. Brown finds solace in reading the ancient classics and Tolstoy, which is probably as good a refuge as any.
Other good friends bury themselves in political or environmental organizing, or careers, or as noted before in travel, nature, eating great food, drinking (a common theme) and other pursuits that while pleasant or (in the case of political work) sometimes satisfying but often not, still don’t quite do the trick.
Religion is another refuge that — so far at least — hasn’t worked for me, although many in the world and some quite close to me swear by it. Being a lapsed Catholic is as close to a relgion as I’ve got, and it’s not that close.
(And many others, of course, firmly believe religion is the problem, not the solution, with plenty of evidence to bolster their argument.)
It would be wonderful to truly believe and feel that the universe is designed for good. It certainly has a godly amount of beauty in it, and wonder, balanced quite unfortunately by a huge amount of human horror.
So here I am, pondering the tragedies unfolding daily in Israel, in Gaza, in Ukraine, and elsewhere, while also loving my family and friends, glorying in the wonder of having grandchildren and children who mean so much to me, being happily married and happily ensonced in a great place, a spot that couldn’t seem further from the furies of the world.
But those furies are gaining on us.
‘Tiz a puzzlement.
An undeniable part of being an adult/grown-up is seeing the world through several different lenses, those of artist, foodie, grandparent, citizen, philosopher, hobbyist, environmentalist, spouse, and for some, chronic or emergent illness. While some can overlap ~ or we force them to overlap ~ each gives us mostly incongruent views and experiences. I think a goal of some is to have a fully-integrated life, but, really, who has that?
We are not the first generation finding it uncomfortable/shocking/supremely disappointing to straddle the innocence of our childhood with the realities of the world as we find it. Yet we need to find equilibrium between the worst that we see with the brave act of living life day to day. So, we find the beauty of nature, the warmth of family, the ecstasy of our senses, the cocoon of literature or art, and the astonishment grandchildren. I would say we are fortunate to be able to pivot from one frame of experience to another, from good and great things, things central to our belief systems, to the tragedies of the world and back again.