Transforming Anger
It is so very easy to get angry about the current situation in the US. Pandemic, recession, hurricanes, flooding, fires, earthquakes, protests about racial injustice, attempts to pack the Supreme Court and undermine elections are all woven together over the past six months. It is almost a perfect storm of calamities.
My anger is not about natural events, although we could have been paying much closer attention to these possibilities significantly earlier. We have handled these problems so poorly, relying more on bravado than expertise. You cannot talk your way out of natural events. Nature does not negotiate.
Anger does not do me any good. To defuse it, I have substantially scaled back my consumption of news. There are too many pundits with too many opinions. Further, nothing surprises me because I have, in effect, been trained to expect the worst. Dastardly deeds flourish. Anything is apparently acceptable.
Consequently, I have decided to stem my anger and just be frustrated. I can creatively deal with frustration. One outlet is the Washington DC Panda Cam where you can watch the progress of the now one-month old panda cub. This 2-pound cub will become a 200 to 300 pound adult. This is comparable to an 8-pound human baby growing to be an 800-1,200 pound adult.
Another outlet is walking outside, especially now that DC is having lovely Fall weather. The expanse of green trees and gardens is relaxing. Within the next month or so, Fall colors will amaze us. The birds and the squirrels do not seem angry or frustrated. They just do their things, oblivious to the calamities we perceive, although climate change will likely eventually affect them.
Interesting and satisfying distractions become the new avocations. Reading history reassures me that we gotten past bad stretches before. I leaven contemporary non-fiction, such as biographies, with occasional murder mysteries. I have been ordering books from Amazon because visits to my favorite bookstores confront me with outpourings of the cottage industry of tell-all insider revelations.
I am hoping that the plethora of calamities will cause society to wake up and look at the challenges we are facing. Avoiding issues and delaying addressing them are not viable approaches to a desirable future. We need to pull together, devise some plans, invest accordingly, and act decisively.
