Surviving the Fall, 1

Any of my Gentle Reader so masochistic as to read my blog daily, or almost every day, will be aware that I have good days and bad days, though I usually have some success in finding the positive germ in the midst of the garbage. There is so much fear-mongering and negative crap thanks to instantly accessible news and social media trolls and the Dump in the White House, and Kinder Morgan, and rich idiots who don't want to pay a little extra property tax on their multi-million dollar homes because, well, they're rich, selfish and greedy idiots who support right wing politicians. Anyway, it shouldn't take much to make us want to dive back under the covers and stay there till after the Apocalypse. And there is the postmodern fallout from centuries of institutionalized slavery as well as the serf-like conditions that indigenous and mixed-race descendants were reduced to in the Americas, and now we have racial profiling and discrimination on one side, and the trauma and overreactions on the other side, and the hand to hand combat between alt Right dickheads and the Politically Correct Thought Police, arguments about White Privilege, uncomfortable elephants in the room such as sidewalks being choked with white beggars and homeless (alongside of aboriginals) and many other uncomfortable questions and contradictions and very selective perceptions, and really, duckies, who wouldn't just want to slam the door on all this unpleasantness and live out the rest of their days totally immersed in a prolonged ecstasy of the beautiful illusions of your choice. Well, why not? Except, this kind of escape is going to be nothing but a nice place to visit, and should you decide to live there, then before you can say "Ermintrude Foonman!" you will wake up poached on psychotropic medications inside a locked ward having a conversation with a psychiatrist daring you to persuade her to not increase your dose. There is so much that is wrong with our world, and we are quickly going to hell on a roller coaster that has lost its chain. Or are we? Yes, there is flooding in New Brunswick, and really, for the past decade at least, every spring there is catastrophic flooding somewhere in Canada, and elsewhere in the world, and this is all credibly attributed to climate change from global warming. Every summer we have catastrophic wildfires and now entire population centres are under threat. And they still want to put in those damn oil pipelines, nor can they imagine leaving the foul substance in the ground, where it belongs. And our elected leaders are so in hock to the greedy psychopathic swine that run these multinational corporations that the end up breaking promise after promise to keep their corporate bosses happy while pretending their is nothing wrong, and no one but us, the so-called fringe element (though we are millions, at least), really seem to care that in two generations there will be nothing left of this planet for our descendants. How do we cope with all this? Well, how do I cope? There is no magic formula, but I think that living in the present is helpful, which also means taking time to enjoy each moment. Gratitude is another. I suppose that one doesn't have to believe in God in order to practice gratitude, but I would say that it helps. It's this maintaining perspective, that we are not alone in the universe, and that everything that we have is indeed a gift. Cultivating the attitude that life is a gift, I think can really bring us places, and this kind of perception can also help us balance between our concerns about our collective future with our enjoyment of our individual present experience. The world may be going to hell, or maybe it isn't. But it's still a beautiful day out there and there is no law in the universe that will forbid our enjoyment of this gift of today.