Gadzooks! A good writer!

There is this longstanding joke (no doubt tedious to those who know me) I utter after witnessing a particularly specious advert, reality show, or fad of some sort: "While the world burns."

Morbid I know. But isn’t humour a great coping mechanism? It certainly got me and my brother through decades of complex trauma.

Anyway, the dilemma you explore in this wonderfully written piece is something I’m sure many of us can relate to. Any endeavour, no matter its ostensible exigency, feels like busying ourselves with the Feng Shui of the Titanic.

I’m fortunate in the respect that I have access to a belief system that allows me to detach myself from the seemingly infinite suffering of the world, without compromising my compassion or responsibility. Indeed, my heart breaks on a daily basis for what so many have to (and will have to) endure mainly due to the whims of an avaricious few. But my palliative can be encapsulated by these two quotes, from Plato and the Buddha respectively:

"Nothing in human affairs is worth any great anxiety."—Plato

"Imagine a mountain. Six miles long, six miles wide, six miles high. And every hundred years a bird flies over the mountain with a silk scarf in its beak; and it runs this silk scarf over the mountain once every hundred years. The length of time it would take the silk scarf to wear away the mountain - that’s how long we’ve been doing this. This life is less than a blink of an eye."—Buddha

This does not mean I don’t care deeply about the state of the world, but I am no good to anybody in a constant state of distress. Keeping the knowledge of impermanence close at hand allows my agency to be grounded in calmness and compassion.

Thank you again for you brilliant article. I enjoyed your writing very much and have followed you.