Keeping your head up

One of the challenges of this time, or any time, is to find a way to keep your sanity and your optimism in the midst of all that life throws at you. Right now, it's the middle of winter--BLAH! Two of my most influential professors--Scott Nobles at Macalester and Ernest Bormann at the University of Minnesota--have died in the last couple of weeks. The economy is tanking. Things in Israel/Gaza really suck. Job responsibilites and financial pressures are everpresent. And dysfunction and craziness abound: I read the cover story in this month's National Geographic about the horrific lives of the men, women, and children around the planet who try to make a living by mining for gold; I didn't realize how unhealthful and depressing their lives really are, and all built around finding little pieces of metal. So in the midst of all this crap, what's one to do?

I'd like to say that religion provides some sort of answer, but it simply doesn't. (Why a loving, omniscient, omnipotent God would tolerate even half of this mess is totally beyond me and beyond anyone with half a brain.) I'd like to say that politics provides an answer, and it may, to some extent--but I am quite powerless to make anything meaningful happen; if I were Mr. Obama, my mindset would be different. I would hope that education can provide an answer, but education is a slow and often agonizing process--exactly what's needed in the long run, but quite ineffective in the short run. I'd like to just forget or ignore some of these things, but that's not really possible either. And (perhaps unfortunately?) drugs are not an easy answer either--when used, they tend to be more of a problem than a solution.

So again, what's a fellow to do? People have been searching for answers to this problem for centuries, so, hard as it may be to believe (ha ha), Contentious Introvert is not going to be able to magically solve this one. It's not as though Maslow's "peak experiences" are an everyday occurance. But I can say that I have at least one coping strategy, which may be silly and hackneyed but seems to help: every day I try--in a very intentional way--to find or make at least one or two "positive" things happen. It may be a long run around the lakes, and the feeling that comes with it. It may be a thank you card to a long-lost person. (For example, such a note to my 8th-grade social studies teacher paid off in a big way.) It may be going a little out of my way to help a student. It may be just one special moment with a person who is special to me. The key for me is to make it a conscious strategy, not just something that happens by accident. Now all of this still doesn't do one thing to change the world, but it enables me to keep on truckin'. And at times--maybe most of the time--that's the best that I can do.