The World is on Fire
How do we cope with the state of the world today? The hate, the wars, the hopelessness? How do we deal with seeing homeless people on our streets and in our neighbourhoods? How do we cope with our neighbours and friends who refuse to get vaccinated, or who insist that we get vaccinated when we don’t want to be vaccinated? How do we deal with Maple MAGA people, or Socialist Liberals wasting our tax dollars? How do we cope with hearing Trump in our newsfeed everyday, or how do we cope with hearing the anti-Trump news? How are we supposed to move through our days when the world is such a depressing, angst-ridden, conflicted place? Whichever side you’re on, it makes you want to stay in bed and pull the covers over your head, doesn’t it?
Years ago I read a book about two children whose parents had gone to war early one summer, leaving them at home with instructions to take care of themselves and above all else, tend to the garden. The children were understandably overwhelmed and afraid. They couldn’t cope with their new, unpleasant circumstances, so they sat down and talked it over. They realized that the one constant in their lives, the one thing that they could control, was to tend to the garden. So every day they got up, did their chores and tended to the garden. They dug, hoed, planted, watered and weeded and tried not to worry about the state of their world outside their home and garden. By the end of the summer they had a flourishing garden with enough vegetables to see them comfortably though the winter. They had grown taller and stronger themselves and found themselves no longer anxious and afraid. Whatever unpleasantness had come along, they turned their backs on it and tended their garden. As summer drew to a close, so did the war and their parents came home to thriving adult sons and a bountiful harvest.
That story stayed with me because it embodies Viktor Frankl’s quote: Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms – to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.
We have the freedom to choose to turn our backs on the negativity that surrounds us and tend to our own gardens, our own homes, our own lives. Or, we can dedicate ourselves to small projects that make our neighbourhoods better: putting away a neighbour’s garbage can for them on garbage pick-up day, bringing a friend food for dinner when they’ve had a rough day, playing a song for a dying man who wants to hear that song one more time, bending the ethics of counselling rules just a tiny little bit to give a distraught client a hug, etc. We can choose to tend our own gardens and emerge from this current state of the world a little stronger or we can choose to make our neighbourhoods a little better. Either way, we’re not giving in to hopeless despair, angst and bitterness.
I’ll end this with another quote from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe: Whatever you think you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. For action has beauty, magic and power in it.
Whichever action we choose, tending our own garden/life or tending our neighbourhood/friends, has the power to transform us into people who are not afraid to live our lives in this turbulent world.