My demographic can worry about a lot of shit (i.e. “first-world problems”). I’m exhibit A there. It’s good to have some perspective sometimes so one doesn’t get TOO deeply mired in this shit-filled swamp (where I live, of course), but at the same time, it reminds me of a basketball saying (or any sport, I guess): you can only play the opponent in front of you. This saying is brought up a lot when a team wins a game/series/championship when the other team has a bunch of injured players, and the point of it is that you can’t downplay their journey or success because of the other team’s travails. Like those teams, we can only deal with the path and the problems before us—and our problems shouldn’t necessarily be trivialized (especially by other people, which is where the real scourge is). There’s no life so bad that there aren’t a group with a far worse lot, or a life so good that there aren’t those out there that don’t have a greater existence yet. That makes perspective difficult to achieve. I sort of allude to that at the end of my novel, “Decline”: greater perspective can be both encouraging and also kinda sad.
In a broad, more practical sense, I know I need to loosen up. A bad day isn’t a bad world, and even a bad world has good days. That’s me popping my head out of the rain clouds for a moment before I duck right back into them.
Whirlpool of Crows 