It has been a long day, week, month, year... I think sometimes when things are so fubar, it is pretty easy to get stuck down in the trenches with it and if not careful, those walls can be notoriously hard to climb. For me, I think what keeps my head on is my family, as no matter what is going on personally, there is always something to do, a responsibility to take care of, an errand to run. Perhaps if I had too much spare time on my mind, my mind would wander into places from where there is no return.
When it is quiet, one's own head may be the scariest place on earth. While an exaggeration at the physical level, perhaps the mind is able to create an unreal world of imaginable horror - where all the fears one knows, can build an impossible world that feels very real. A world that can never be shared with another.
I am lucky though, I have always something to look forward to and people with which to share it. I know what those without do when their own head ends up stuck in a rut, at least from my own experience. I am sure that the last few months have been testing on many and I wonder what the long term repercussions are going to be and how they are going to affect us all. I wonder if there be some kind of low level PTSD involved, where most people haven't faced this kind of thing before and are perhaps less capable than people earlier to cope with it.
While it is impossible to know what will happen, all of these little changes and additional pressures are going to compound in individuals and spread out across communities. In some way, it might be a combination of burnout and nervous breakdown at a scale never seen before, and it is happening simultaneously at a global level.
The interconnectedness of the world is apparent when things like toilet paper shortages hit at the same time around the world, something that had no need to actually happen in most locations - if any. The panic drives behavior and action becomes a chain reaction event driven by memes shared across social platforms. It is a strange world we have created and it has really only been possible at this speed and scale for a handful of years - what happens in a handful more?
While the future looks bleak from some respects and promising from others, I guess that the goal is to take control of what we can now and try to direct it toward where we want it to be - hopefully hitting some of that promise. What this means to each of us might differ greatly, but I do think it helps to have something healthy to focus on and hopefully, people to share it with - either way.
I think that this is what helps me as well - regardless of potential failure, the reason to try is ever present and it is something that is external to me. There are days where I do feel like I walked it alone, but when the evening comes - I know that I wasn't. And I know that the day mattered.
Taraz
[ Gen1: Hive ]