Really beautiful perspective, Liz. I didn't watch the globes (mostly because I live in a childcare bubble some days and forgot!) but I have experienced these feelings and thoughts a thousand times during Covid, George Floyd's death, the war in Ukraine, now Isreal, Palestine, Gaza....There has been suffering forever, we are only just more aware of it now as media is so immediate and constant. As an empath. I can easily get swallowed whole by the grief and have lost months and even years of my life, my joy, my connection to my kids, my writing life, and parts of my career to that kind of grief during covid times. This perspective might have helped me then so I applaud the risk that it is to say this, now. This, especially:
"I’m sorry we live in a world that can so easily steal our happiness. I spend my life trying to make it a better one, best I can. So then, maybe you can understand my personal perspective, which is that when I feel sad about the world, losing myself in grief too long does nothing of value for me. Losing myself in great stories, however — it’s a balm. I need it. Even the greatest activists rest. They restore. They find moments of joy."
I am not a TV person, and it's my instinct to take myself and the world too seriously, and I can relate to both sides of this. But last night my kids begged me to plop on the cough with them and watch Is It Cake, a gimmicky, (frankly wasteful) food show they love that would normally make me cringe. But as my 8-year-old son's hand felll on my leg, as I watched him draped over his sister, and their heads tip toward each other in rest, I felt the love and connection with each other as we mutually cheered for the sweet underdog of the show. We lost two young boys in our community this week to a tragic car crash and there's been a lot of sadness, here. And it would have been so easy to demand my kids to get up and write letters of condolence, or spin my wheels all night obsessing over what to do to help the families. But in that small moment, what my kid's little hearts needed was to feel safe and connected to me. To know, at least for that moment, they could let the sadness go.
"These times", as others have said, are always in big or small ways. We have to stay tapped into our joy, and art and love and laughter along with grief and empathy and action--to be whole.
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