12.13.06

Thinking Disconsolate Thoughts

Posted in Personal at 10:50 pm by Joe Blubaugh

Or: Melt Away, Fall Away

It’s that schizophrenic early-winter time here in the midwest, where there will be blizzards and car crashes and gloom followed by weeks of spring-like calm and warmth. It’s unsettling weather, and every year I feel that I am living in a strange place, no matter how many winters like this pass.

Of course, the whole world frequently strikes me as a strange place. Sometimes it seems strange and wondrous, especially when I am learning something amazing like the fact that turtles do not age like other animals. More often, the world seems strange and cruel.

The increase in impersonal communication in my life has probably had a lot to do with this. The more newspapers I read, television I watch, websites I visit, the more depressed I get. We start wars without good reason, we fail to protect people from the predations of the greedy and powerful. We grow stupid and slack. I get angry, and that anger turns into depression and malaise.

I can’t decide whether cutting back my intake of world news would be helpful. It would be good for me personally, but it also seems like an abdication of responsibility. I’d be happier, but I’d be ignorant, and the happiness of ignorance is complacent and delusional. Not knowing about tragedies doesn’t stop them from happening, and I live in a world of great and terrible powers, powers that have no care for our survival.

While ignorant happiness may be delusional, it’s hard to stay sane for long.

The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make heaven of Hell, and a hell of Heaven. -Milton

We have a tremendous capacity for self-deception, for acclimating to whatever surrounds us and surviving as best as we can. I catch myself doing this, making do, being satisfied, but I don’t believe that the current state of affairs is something to be satisfied about.

Right now I’m terrified that I’ll go through life striving, saving, hearing that happiness will be right around the corner, trying to create good things but funding my own disaffection every time I buy dinner. Either that, or I’ll forget being motivated to do something and live mechanically until I die. How hard to find a balance, somewhere that I can be happy but not complacent.

Aren’t you gonna come along, aren’t you going to fight?

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