This thought hit me the other day and it has been floating around my head trying to tell me something that is so obvious that I’m blind to it. It’s not an original thought, other people have come up with it, and I’m almost certain that I’ve written about it before. Still, sometimes the only way I can make life make sense is by writing about it and this is one of those times.
It’s simple and silly, really. A few days ago I had something happen that made my anxiety level shoot through the roof. The what really isn’t important, but my reaction is. I was in one of those modes where I can’t sit down and my brain won’t stop going through worst case scenarios for hours and despite the fact that I am well aware that this is dumb and counterproductive I still go ahead with it. The thing is, I started to ask myself why in the world am I worrying?
I mean, by any measure I am incredibly blessed and in those top few percentiles of life. I’ve got a roof over my head, clean drinking water and the odds of my being mauled to death in a bear attack are surprisingly low. On a planet of six and a half billion, not that many people can make that claim. But yet I still complain even though my only real problems are a lack of a girlfriend and the fact that I don’t see my family as much as I would like and while those are real issues they are pretty much the definition of trivial. No bombs falling overhead, no questioning where my next meal is coming from, just a lot of free time where I can sit at a desk and write about Lindsay Lohan all night.
And it’s that last part that’s really bothering me. Because more and more I’m beginning to wonder that the one rule that I’ve decided to live by may not be sufficient. I’ve never said that I knew the meaning of life but I was confident that I had the purpose of life figured out, that you were supposed to live your life in such a way that on your last day that you could look back and state without a doubt in your mind that the world was a better place because of what you did. In whatever way, big or small, you had a positive impact on the world. I still think that is at its essence true but I wonder if it is really enough. That because of the position that I’m in, I really owe the world more than being nice to everyone I meet and recycling.
Plus, I’m probably now more concerned over the fate of the planet than I have ever been since I was a little kid growing up with The Day After and the Doomsday Clock and news predictions of a nuclear holocaust by the end of the century. What’s been worrying me is all that I have been reading on climate change and how it really is here now. Does anyone consider what we just had a winter? I’ve read predictions of mass extinctions or near extinctions in the next fifty years if we keep at the current pace. There’s something about the fact that in my lifetime that there may no longer be any polar bears that really gets to me. And I fear that everyone is just going to go, “Don’t worry, science will fix things” except that there are some things that science can’t fix. It isn’t magic, at some point things just are the way they are.
So I’m wondering why I am worrying about all these petty events in my life when there are much bigger issues to worry about. More than that, I am wondering why I am worrying about them, which accomplishes nothing other than costing me sleep, when I could be trying to change the situation. I’m just trying to figure out what that one thing that I could do is.
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