how to stay cool in a handbasket to hell

Sorry friends, as eager as I am to continue the discussion on dying of embarrassment while doing what you want to which somehow means forcing yourself to write every morning ...

... there's a bigger fish to fry.

The world is a mess, is it not? Hunger, strife, war, terrorism, pollution, extremism, ignorance, hatred, disease, slavery, torture, materialism, totalitarianism, political corruption, ethnic cleansing - and that's just in the US ;) - can make the world seem like it is spiraling out of control.

That's the fish I want to fry. It's a doozie.

So I'm scaling it, gutting it, and rolling it around in some cornmeal. I'm greasing up the pan and setting it down on the fire ...

oh ... oh dear ... oh my ...

... a hint from the chef for future reference:

Large, water-logged globes water aren't well-suited to pan frying.

Try it with a fat juicy tomato if you don't believe me. It is an exercise in frustration. You put it down on the hot pan and you have to roll it over every three minutes because only about one square centimeter at a time makes contact with the pan. And after awhile it starts to get really hot so you either burn your fingers while trying to hold it in place - because of course it is round so it isn't just going to lie still when you roll it on its side - or you come up with some kind of makeshift tomato clamp with whatever long handled utensils happen to be within arms reach.

This is a handy, if rather long-winded, metaphor, isn't it? Because as some of you already know, we can't take on the whole world at once. It is physically impossible.

It is also emotionally impossible. Thinking about all the depressing things in the world at once is pretty much guaranteed to cause any sense of social responsibility (latent or otherwise) within us to crumple itself up and roll under the TV stand.

But the world is a mess! you say. It's a mess! It is an utter mess!! The threats against us are manifold and we're incapable of responding adequately to any of them! We're doomed! DOOMED!

I could go on at length about how that's true, we are doomed, we all going to die someday and because technology can push that off into the unforeseeable future, our natural death instinct has gone completely haywire and ... but that's a rant for another day.

Instead, consider this ...

If the Zens are right and the world is actually just a big mirror that reflects you back to yourself, then the way to fry this big, blue, exceptionally messy marble of a fish of ours is to find and/or make peace and happiness within yourself.

That sounds completely idiotic, doesn't it?

Well ...

What the hell else are you going to do?

Seriously.

If your sense of social responsibility is cowering under the TV stand and you can't coax it out, why not make peace and happiness within what's left of your self?

If everybody on the planet could manage that, maybe alot of this shit would blow over.

If that doesn't work for you, pick one semi-manageable spot on this large, waterlogged globe, batter it up, and get that pan on the fire, pronto.