The Elephant in the Room

When We Can't Control the Terrible, We Must Control the Wonderful

For 25 years I made my living as a journalist, so it pains me to say this, but I have developed a full-blown emotional allergy to the news. I call up my many subscription news sites multiple times a day, scan the headlines, feel a firehose blast of revulsion, and X out of the browser.

Nightly news check-ins have begun to make me soul sick, so now I start the salad instead.

Perhaps you understand.

Perhaps you understand that while journalism has ever focused outsized attention on the negative*, today's dire headlines accurately reflect a raging planet. I'm not saying the world offers nothing to be optimistic about, but boy, do you have to dig for good news. The forces of evil seem to have the upper hand.

People are suffering — mightily and at scale. And we can donate money and attempt to influence a political system teeming with corruption, but as individuals, the truth is that each of us has only about a five-foot wingspan.

That's the elephant in the room. If we are currently lucky enough not to be merely fighting for survival, we feel we should be marshaling forces to make thing better, but alas. There are precious few ways to do it.

It isn't just that we feel impotent; it's that we are.

Mostly.

I spent last evening with two friends I see every few months for dinner, and I woke up still kind of high from the experience. No controlled substances were involved. It was just three of us who have been connected over the years by compatible sensibilities and a deep disdain for small talk. Whenever we get together, I spend a day or so revisiting our conversations. My dining companions might be surprised at how exhilarated I feel in their presence, and how I miss them again almost as soon as we part.

But this is love, and love and connection are the only antidotes I know for soul sickness, so I'm leaning into them hard. Not only because it soothes me, but because I feel a kind of moral obligation not to cede any more ground to despair than is absolutely necessary. Is this the one way we can be useful? Maybe it is.

There might well come a day when we need deep reserves of improbable optimism. That's the stuff that great novels are written about, and the stuff that actual heroes summon when the going gets tough. So if it takes making phone calls to friends we've lost touch with; if it takes telling people we love them, or stepping in to be of service, then that's the work we should be doing.

And no feeling guilty for taking a break to watch reruns of "Friends." What we want is not to join those who are suffering in their misery, but for the suffering to be able to once again live lives of big love and small pleasures.

In an art class I took years ago, we were assigned to keep a sketchbook that recorded different kinds of color palettes. One week we were asked to find certain kinds of color combinations in nature; take photographs; record what we saw. I can't recall a single detail of what colors I found, but the act of forced noticing has been a long-lasting gift.

Now seems like a good time to start intentionally noticing signs of human connection, love, and nature's insistence on its own rhythms and beauty. Not as a distraction, but because if it's true that what we focus on expands, then we'd better be focusing on the right things.

So: Big love. Less news, more connection. Lavish appreciation of the divine. These are gifts not to squander.

Faced with the elephant in the room — that there are zero to too-few ways to directly eradicate evil and reduce suffering — expanding the good is our only option.

Speaking of connection …

I’m thinking of a cool little practice for the coming year, called Get Snailmail from Karen.

If you’d enjoy getting a note from me in the U.S. Mail, send me an address. I can’t promise it will be quick, but I’ll try to make it fun.

Footnote

*I mentioned the negativity bias of the news at the start of this essay. It’s true; it’s a real thing. I hasten to add that this derives from the fact that news is inherently focused on what is out-of-the-ordinary, aka “news.” Is it to be hoped that we still live in a world where the ordinary equals prevailing good.