If there was ever a time to focus on yourself, this is it.

And maybe we don't have a responsibility to read the news!

a seagull, probably happier than all of us because they have never read a newspaper.

My brain is empty of thoughts at the moment.

No, that's not the right way to phrase it.

My brain is more focused on real life at the moment.

More focused on paying my bills at the end of the month, at making sure I spend time with my friends, with my family. More focused on walking the ever-thinning tightrope of mental stability in the digital 21st century.

It'd be wrong to say there aren't many big thoughts going on up there, they're just internally focused big thoughts.

I feel a bit guilty for feeling this, for writing this. When I see posts about another country doing bad things, a big corp endlessly polluting, endless human rights violations, its hard to take it in. It's not that I don't care, but sometimes it feels like just another thing tagged on the long laundry list of horrors. It feels like we simply have to swallow this news knowing there will be another horror next week, the next day, in the next hour.

I have topics I want to explore, but i feel like I'm coming up against a invisible wall. it ranges from me being confused why I can't quite think and write, all the way to feeling like I am slamming my entire body against the wall but I can't get through. I feel similarly when I try to read any of the publications I usually adore, my brain doesn’t want to take in any more information.

I think I kind of just want to feel alive at the moment. Crawl out of my cave of winter and run in the rain, soak up the rays of the sun, laugh until my stomach hurts, hug my loved ones and talk about how lucky we are to have each other.

Maybe having these feelings of being alive, of life still being worth living, of the world being innately good is exactly what we do need. Maybe we need to put our blinders on and live our lives utterly and completely for ourselves, experience the full range of emotions being human brings, without The Man looking down on us, telling us how to feel, making us insecure, making us unsafe. Maybe its time to close our eyes and put our fingers in our ears, to focus on the little worlds within us and around us. and to look after number one. (That's you!)

I read these words in Samantha Clark's recent Substack,

The Life Boat

, and they reminded me how important fully living our lives is at times like these: "Joy is resistance. Being present to the place and the people immediately around us is resistance. Watching the light move over the sea is resistance. Cultivating our natural intelligence over an techno-artificial one is resistance. Creativity, whatever form it takes, is resistance: making, growing, connecting, writing, nurturing, taking care of things, people, creatures. Working day by day, like the monks. Challenging the move fast and break things mentality with move gently and mend things, this too is resistance."

I've always believed the way the horrors of the world are thrust at us are a way to overwhelm us, to drown us in feelings of hopelessness and helplessness until we disengage and become jaded and irritated and lost all belief in the goodness of humanity.

But at the same time, this feels like a privilege, it feels like our responsibility to try to untangle the goings on in the world, to feel the horrors fully in our bodies, to understand how we may find a way solve the world's problems.

Oliver Burkeman's recent piece made something click in my mind. He spoke to this idea of the impossibility of acting as if the news didn't exist, yet at the same time, this increasing frustration at the idea that this is “not the time to turn away”.

He discussed how the issue with how we consume the news through websites and social media is that we find ourselves “living inside the news”, that this world we access is somehow more real or more important than our immediate surroundings.

"[Y]ou should make sure your psychological centre of gravity is in your real and immediate world – the world of your family and friends and neighborhood, your work and your creative projects, as opposed to the world of presidencies and governments, social forces and global emergencies."

Keeping our centre of gravity on our immediate and local means the ever-increasing horrors of world events is a place you visit and then return from "in order to gain perspective, and to spend time doing some of the other things a meaningful life is about".

Oliver explains how we now feel we spend a lot of time inside the heads of far-off strangers, we aren't simply seeing the activities of politicians, we are fully feeling them inside of us, and we need a level of distance, of privacy(!) between us and them.

Another piece, one by

eliza mclamb

who asked the question ‘How much do we really need to know’? When she has read the news, she devours it wholly, yet realises going down the scrolling rabbit hole doesn’t help her see the picture any clearer. She talks about an impulse I recognise in myself of constantly ‘intaking information, as though it were a moral imperative to know every meticulous detail of all Earthly horrors’, and how this information resulted in her feeling less about the things she wanted to care about.

She concludes with a similar point to Oliver: “I must, however, remain clear-eyed and energetic enough to fight what is currently happening and what is to come. I cannot do that when I am overwhelmed, when I am broken. I cannot do that when I am […], anesthetized.”

When life, the news, the world is becoming overwhelming again, I do the same as Samantha, I put my boots on and I walk and walk and walk. I forget how necessary and nourishing it is to do so, until I am standing in a field, or a park, or next to a tree, and realise I am calm once again.

With the emotional battery we receive from what feels like all sides in this modern world, I feel we have to stay impenetrable in our belief that theses images shown on our screens aren’t the truest reflections of humanity. The second we allow this belief to be eroded is the second The Man! succeeds in creating a society of hopelessness and helplessness humans happy to submit to whatever regulations support their sweeping fill their pockets however much it may to choke our planet.

There is this quote from

Andrew Boyd

that I’d like to leave you with, one that has been been playing on loop inside my head: "It’s okay to titrate the bad news, I told her, to only let in what you can handle at any given moment. Do what you need to do in order to keep yourself grounded and stay in the game. You don’t have to stare unblinking at the apocalypse, you can squint at it."

P.S. If you enjoy my writing, you can buy me a coffee to fuel my work.