Here I am again facing a painful old question that just seems to be getting bigger: how to operate in relation to problems of different orders of magnitude. I’m struggling these days between a kind of fractured mind, where sometimes I can focus on looking for a good little job and cleaning my apartment, and other times the enormity of category five hurricanes hitting the heartland, and the polar icecaps reaching a thinning tipping point, and the oil reserves running dry, and New York’s garbage piling up off the coast of New Jersey, threatens to swallow up all the room in my mind for rational thought. How can we continue to move from conversations about the season premiere of LOST to those other conversations, half joking, about whether or not this is the end of the world, where we smile ironically but avoid each other’s eyes, afraid we’ll see our own questionning fear echoing back at us.
One of the students in the class I was a Teaching Assistant for last year said: “Me and my friends are at this place of wondering whether we’re going to go on with the whole career life hustle or if we’re just going to fuck it and do nothing.” I’m paraphrasing as best I can remember. We laughed when he said it, the professor and I, because it has that typical twenty-something ring to it, and even a hint of well-off kid enjoying a pleasure-oriented life-style. But at the same time, god but I know what he means. Those are the two choices that seem to present themselves to you when your mind feels tired out by the split and complicated focus our modern mediated world requires. Because we are, in some ways, in a very new world. We know more people, more places, more aspects of more problems, and more ways to distract ourselves then any earlier period in history. And maybe some of us won’t be able to take it. Maybe some people will give up on the constant learning that it takes to succeed, or potentially to contribute meaningfully at all, in this new environment.

When I feel daunted and drained I have two mind mechanisms that I try and activate.

I’ve been working since I was little on finding a way to summarize and simplify how I wanted to be, so that I could feel I had a method and a morality to fall back on when I was drunk or confused or out of my element. The first one I came up with when I was in high school- when I was worried about religions and which one was true and how to figure out whose advice to follow. It’s this: be kind. Seems a bit simple when I lay it out like that, and that is sort of the idea. However- think about how being kind works on the people you are kind to, and how you can be kind to yourself, and how being kind is different mentally and produces different effects than being tolerant or being generous or being confident or being proud and you’ll have an idea of why I think kindness is a solid, pragmatic tactic.
The other mind mechanism or personal catch phrase I’ve come to rely on is similarly simple and pragmatic, and it is my way of answering the freaked-out questionning I described before, it’s just this: keep steady. Keep steady and keep looking around, and time will continue to pass, people will walk by with babies and dogs, leaves will fall, different politicians will be elected. Keep steady and the formation of ideas that seems inescapable, inevitable, will be shaken by something unexpected and new and will be forced to evolve. And then I’ll be reminded how little I know, and my world-sized panic will seem sweet but small, or I’ll get a bit bored of it and a bit curious again about what else I could be doing.
And so I think those conversations about LOST, or Canadian Idol, or Freaks and Geeks, or the new Bright Eyes album, or whatever, might be ways of taking a little breath, and of shaking a little perspective into our own formations of fear and doubt and worry and ego and responsibility. We need art for arts sake- not for distraction, but for the alternate opinions that can help us continuously re-achieve balance. More than helping us to keep steady, they cast questions about morality and mind mechanisms into new contexts and new light. They serve up stories and bits of life experience and desires and kindnesses and creulties in a palatable way, and so, when we look at them in a steady way without allowing them to swoop us up too muchinto their their own, often narrow, world views, they can help us help each other to keep on keepin on.
That’s what I think. And so, of course, that’s what I look for in my media, and so maybe I make a little self-fulfilling equation for myself. At any rate, it often works, so I thought I’d share it with you.