I’m sitting out on the patio in a sunbeam. It’s March 5 in Vancouver, the sounds of children laughing and calling out to each other in the park across the street drift up to me with raucous joy.
The sun is bright and sparkles ripple off the water in False Creek. Boats at anchor gently swirl with the tide’s ebb and flow. Summer Sailing is enticing me to escape my land home and to join the wind and waves.
The best life, the best job, the best people in my life. The best is very humbling at this time in the world. I never have had the suffering of war or civil unrest that so many in the rest of the world have experienced. It’s a double edged sword, feeling helpless to change the world, when all I want is for humanity to be at our collective best, while careening recklessly into our collective worst.
STOP, make it all stop. Stop and listen, stop and think, stop and extend your hand to those who have been left behind to starve, to suffer illness, to die in the night from a bomb, a bullet, an overdose, a silent cancer.
I can’t let all the hurt in the world live in my head, and do the job I have of caring for the mentally ill, and supporting them in a caring, effective manner. To keep my wits about me when the world is exhausting requires a constant shift in focus.
So I swivel, focusing on today, on the task in front of me, and save the news for the end of the day, the week. So much of what is happening is history of what has gone before. To educate myself I turn to the records of the wars, learning so much more makes it worse, awareness of so much senseless suffering.
Feeling lucky to live where we live, yet with an uneasy anxiety of what is ahead. Watching the world dynamics, how quick it all can change. The price of oil soars and how quick it effects us all. As we groan under the increased cost, what will happen if it all is lost. When we have no fuel to keep us warm and no power to keep us cool.
The future of the world is now, is it too late? Ok I can’t go there and be OK, but I can’t stop looking and learning. From BBC today: “It is often tempting to look upon Vladimir Putin as the millennium bug in a human and deadly form.” How does one man get to inflict so much suffering on innocent people, how does he obtain so much power. Why, WHY, why??
Another writer Victoria Erickson, posted this poem:
Mundanity: noun, plural mun·dan·i·ties. the condition or quality of being mundane; mundaneness. an instance of being mundane: one of the mundanities of everyday life.
In response this so described my lucky, uneasy happiness:
And so it always has been..I think this is what poetry does for us, it unites us in our differences. It allows us to feel (or at least try to feel) each other’s heartaches . It stirs the unique, and the collective humanness in all of us. As we pray for Ukraine, so we pray for ourselves..lest any evil should make us numb to the suffering of others.
I want to be numb, but the angst does not let me.
This lucky, uneasy happiness persists.
One reply on “LUCK… an uneasy happiness.”
Yes, that is the $64,000 dollar question (for those of us that remember the old TV show).
That game show and the spin offs enjoyed a special time in the 50’s.
It was the Cold War and Nikita Khruchev claimed Russia (then the USSR) would bury the West.
That sentiment out of Russia from that time has not changed: only the the Russian leadership has changed.
The intent actions are the same as always.