The News Was On

On a world that is terrible and close to perfect at the same time.

The News Was On

The news was on. I turned it off and the room was still there.

I looked out the window. The tree was still standing.

A minute earlier the screen had been full of it. Politicians talking past each other about things that were not the point. Suffering somewhere far away that I could see and could not touch. Animals with no one to stand up for them. The whole weight of it arriving in the room from thousands of miles away and nothing I could do about any of it.

Then I turned it off, and the tree was there.

This is the thing I keep coming back to. The world is in a terrible state. I am not going to pretend it is not. There is cruelty in it that has no reason, and suffering that falls on the ones least able to carry it, and people in charge who seem to have forgotten what they are for. All of that is real. None of it should be waved away.

And at the same time, the world is close to perfect. Not the world on the screen. The world in the room. People helping each other. People pulling together when things get hard, which they do, far more often than the news will ever show you. A family talking around a table. Grandchildren on the floor playing with a game, not knowing yet how hard the world can be. The tree outside the window that has stood through every piece of bad news ever broadcast and has never once heard any of it.

Both of these are true. That is what I cannot get past. The world is in a terrible state and the world is close to perfect, and they are the same world, at the same time, and I do not know how to make them sit together.

For a long time I thought the answer was simple. If everyone got their own life in order, the world would come right. Tend your own corner. Look after the people in front of you. If everyone did that, the suffering would stop.

But that is the easy way out, and life does not happen like that. People do not get their lives in order. The world is not going to become a tidy collection of well-kept rooms. I know that now.

And there is something underneath it that is harder to admit. A lot of people do not think the way I think. I turn off the news and look at the tree and feel the world is mostly whole. Someone else leaves it on and feels they are bearing witness to something they have no right to turn away from. Who is to say I am right and they are wrong. I have found a way to stand in a world that is both terrible and close to perfect. It is my way. It is not the answer. I am not even sure there is one.

So I am left where I started. The news is off. The tree is still standing. The world is in a terrible state and the world is close to perfect, and I do not know how to make them sit together.

I have stopped expecting to.