My husband is a light-hearted fellow at times and this morning was one of those times. He tried to tell me a joke and, hearing just the first part of it, (it had to do with politics) I told him I didn’t want to hear it. He persisted and so did I, so separating ourselves to different floors of the house was the best we could do on behalf of having a peaceful morning.
In the silent aftermath, as I walked around my chosen territory, the kitchen and dining area, I had the opportunity to look at what was behind my hyper-sensitive
intensity. It’s a common fault, but this seemed a bit over the top, even for me.
While finishing my greens and eggs, I reviewed how I’d spent my weekend. Most of Saturday I attended a Training for White Accomplices sponsored by the Thomas Merton Center. I felt hope and some inspiration from the idealistic young activists I met, earnestly preparing themselves and their audiences for actions to change the world in the direction of racial equity and justice for all. Sunday I read newspaper articles about impeachment and the fragile state of democracy in my own country.
I thought of Greta Thunberg, the teenage climate activist who spoke at the UN recently. Seeing and hearing her speak, I feel on the inside like she looked and sounded on the outside. We are both in the midst of what can be at times, overwhelming grief; she for the stolen future that was to be the birthright of her generation, and me at the undoing of much of what I and others in my generation worked for in our life times. It’s not the grief and disappointment that the candidate you worked for lost the election. It’s whether fair and honest elections will ever be possible again.
Most of us have enough loss in our regular personal lives to deal with, a sister living with Alzheimer’s, a family member’s mental illness, a neighbor’s son dies of an overdose, our own health challenges. I chide myself to not over-react to the big societal body’s losses and pending dooms. There is such a thing as system overload and compassion fatigue. But the big losses seem to frame the personal ones, sometimes dwarfing them, sometimes interconnecting and underlining their importance.
Like many people, many things have come into my life that I did not choose, circumstances I didn’t even see coming. Not to be a plaything of circumstances, I’ve taken to listening carefully to what life is asking of me in the new, unanticipated situations. It’s a day to day experiment but Victor Frankl put it best – “Everything can be taken from man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms –to chose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
Andrea Wedner, a survivor of the Tree of Life mass shooting in my hometown of Pittsburgh speaking near the one year anniversary of that event said, “I’m going to live my life. It was almost taken away, and I’m not going to let that happen, so I am going to enjoy.”
I try to follow this path but it’s unclear right now if I’ll ever be able to reclaim my sense of humor.
What do you find helpful in not getting overly impacted by the traumatic news events of our times?
Sheila
