If you happen to check the news frequently (something I probably should not be doing quite as often as I so) it's incredibly easy to feel deflated. Defeated. So much happening and all of it bad. Afganistan falling. Earthquakes and hurricanes. Covid burning a swathe across stupidly unvaccinated America. When I check the local news, so many shootings daily. Because the world is fucked up world of violence and guns and mysogynists and racists. And that's on top of natural things, many of our own creation and neglect (plagues, global warming), though some not (earthquakes, obviously.) It's easy to feel like so much is for naught. Twenty years of war. Of dead soldiers and citizens. Of money and efforts that in the end, resulted still in Taliban control of the country. Or covid lockdowns, vaccine rollouts, job losses, deaths--people who got swept up in the first couple of waves and never made it out of the water. The healthcare workers who risked their lives and lost them. How every time it seems we are moving forward or making gains, we lose so much ground and start again that we never get there.
While obviously far below a national disaster, it's easy to feel like our lives are like this too on the micro-level. A few months ago, even though I have a good system of post-its that comprise my daily to-do list, I would finish my week feeling like I could not tell you what I had accomplished that week. Obviously, something. But if I didn't get triumphantly to everything, I still felt a failure for all that I did not finish or do. Those notes that had to be pressed to the following week. This weariness cut across all swathes of my life--writing and art, the press, library things. Even housework and organization tasks. But also the awareness that things keep coming at you, on all those fronts, so there is never a feeling of finishedn-ess or accomplishment--just more to do. I felt this way so much that I started keeping an additional tiny notebook where I listed everything I did accomplish. It helped, but only some. Because I apparently like boat analogies, imagine that you are setting sail, and it all depends on whether or not you can keep the boat from taking on water. Except, there is only more water replaced by what you've dumped out. And there's more of it. And faster.
But then, maybe I just need to change the frame of reference. Yes, the boat is still full of water, but look how far away the shore we left. How we can just see the lip of the opposite one. Maybe in the efforts (of war, people were still saved. People's lives were still different. In the covid battle, for every selfish asshole, the streets of the city have been filled with people masking up and being careful. Someone is still alive because of the choices they made--that we all made (though the reverse is also true.) Nothing is really for nothing at all, though it's hard to convince yourself of that when the boat sinks a little more each day. When you're tired of rowing and bailing out the sea at the same time. When that shore is barely visible at all.
Though perhaps it's possible to live in these middle, transitional spaces without losing your shit. The boat in the middle of the ocean. The calm in the middle of a storm. We tend to think of things as the beginning and and of a journey--to freedom for everyone, to the end of the pandemic, but ignore the small shifts in wind that add up. I am trying to pay attention to these shifts, these tiny increments when I scan the news, because really, it's all I can do...
