How to keep trying

Because I must

Hello there,

I’d like to wish you a happy hugely belated New Year, and I hope that can still be a thing at some point in 2022. Really I do.

Events recently seem to have sucked some optimism out of me; not that events elsewhere in the world aren’t important (proximity bias is a thing which I’m not sure how to navigate, and am wrestling with). But essentially the last few days have got me thinking: how do we keep striving for things with such madness, such trauma, as a backdrop?

Well, as a child I was most optimistic in the morning, with a belief that the day’s events could bring something decent. Something wonderful on the news (I know, right), or something great for someone who was struggling, or for some sign that the Earth just wasn’t inherently horrible. I wasn’t fatalistic, I just assumed the world ultimately had the same joy and optimism that I had. That the good would out, and human progress meant positivity. Egotistical? Idealistic then? Perhaps, but I was only eight or nine, and it seemed to make sense.

I still worried about things, including conflict even at a young age, but every morning I was happy to be able to have another day and happy that good possibilities may usher bad ones away.

I suppose morning hope is a mantra I should have now, briefly revisited in the afternoon to check it’s still there.

Yes the outside world needs knowing about and paying attention to - sometimes even keeping at arm’s length for health’s sake. But when sat inside as the rain comes teeming down, and the pooch is bundled up next to me as he is now…and I have this keyboard and this space to write… Well, I can’t help but hope for more harmony.

I am, at my core, hopeful.

What can I do? I am now a larger human, though still just one. But I am not being overtly censored. I have freedoms. I have privileges I’m aware of and am learning about. I have a power to help change things, to empathise, to entertain, to be open to conversation. I have the power to create, even for five minutes, a space of potential positivity. So:

I need to keep trying.

I need to create.

I need to talk.

I need to care.

I need to work together with others (I feel we all need connection).

I’ll try to do the above then, with the expectation that there is no reward for such actions. These things are done because they are needed. My creativity, much as I value it, is its own reward before anything else.

The Earth is not a cold dead place. And neither am I. So I must try.

And tomorrow maybe I’ll write something better.

All the best

~ KP