I’ve started a blog, maybe even several blogs, by quoting my late father who always said, “Never worry about the things you can’t change.” It was good, solid advice from a smart, worldly-wise old sailor, although the words were entirely wasted on me, given that I spend far too many waking hours, and indeed sleeping hours, worrying about the things I cannot change. If anything, my condition, if that’s what it is, has worsened, not improved, by the passage of time. I’m not sure there’s anything I can do to change it.
How much easier would life be if I could just ignore all the bad bits in life? Sick family and friends, economic equality at home and abroad, the spread of the far right, again at home and abroad, the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East, to name but two, and the increasing shit show that life is becoming. And if that’s not bad enough, once we get through that, we die. Is it any wonder that so many of us retreat to the imaginary world of social media and live a life of nothing more than hedonism and then tell our small world about it?
Confronting the world as it is and not how you would like it to be is a choice that is not available to everyone. I know that for millions of people today can be little more than an existential battle that hopefully leads to another tomorrow. Largely, being stuck inside these four walls, with little opportunity for life to change and maybe even get better. No chance of joining the middle-aged, middle-class world of social media, where everything involves a big gurning selfie and enjoying, or perhaps -who knows? – faking happiness. Isn’t that a better place than cancer, crime, poverty, war? Me? I could never find it.
Despite my many flaws, I would like to think that I have I have always been a doer. I was briefly a local parish councillor when no one else wanted to do it, I became secretary of the football club I played for because no one else wanted to do it, I was a volunteer helper at the professional football club I supported because I was worried it might go bust, I became a trade union official because I really believed in making the lives of working people better and these days I volunteer for a food bank because I have this strange, old fashioned outlook on life, whereby I don’t like to see people going without food. Does this make me feel better about life? Of course not. Facing reality rarely does.
How much easier would it be if I simply did everything for me, my close family and close friends? All these thing I chose to do, with the exception of the food bank volunteering, were stressful. How much easier would it have been to have hidden myself away from reality because so much of reality is shit? Simple answer, for me it wouldn’t be.
For me it was always a simple choice of allowing the world to simply pass me by hiding beneath the bed covers – something I did for many years when I was younger and living alone – or confronting the world as it is and accepting that we are not going to be here forever. In the end, my choice was going to involve concerning myself with many things I couldn’t affect because in my world they mattered.
There are rewards to be gained from confronting reality, not that you seek out rewards in the first place. If you’ve been fretting over someone’s medical condition and they recover, that’s a reward in itself. If you, as a trade union official, help to save someone’s job, that’s a reward, too. And if someone gets an emergency food package that means that they will not go without food, then that’s a reward because I played a very small part in that (as did you when you donated some items).
Looking away just doesn’t work for me. Sure, I love to do nice things for myself, like go on holiday, buy far too much music, drink some good wine but my world, my overthought and often overwrought world of confusion, is the only way I know how to live.
I do my little bit to make the world a better place, others do far much more and I am constantly humbled by the kindness and generosity of others. Social media can be a nice place to escape to and maybe for you this imaginary world in cyberspace is enough. It probably would be for me, if I was to follow my father’s advice, but make believe, I’m afraid, can never be enough.
I’ll still concern myself with things I can’t change but every now and then I find that somehow I have managed to help effect change when I never thought I could. And that’s when that nighttime stressing can seem worthwhile.
