Day: September 7, 2024
Have pity on the young
When you’re young and have no secure place
When you don’t know who you are or who you’ll be.
Suffering a great loss is hard to face.
The pain of loss is grievous to embrace.
You look around but no solutions see.
When you’re young and have no secure place
If you feel so low beware the base
The good will show your mercy for no fee
Suffering a great loss is hard to face.
Life is hard and pain gives us distaste
But discipline is needed and is free
When you are young and have no secure space
For sorrow and its friends we feel distaste.
Yet we must mourn, the sages all agree
Suffering a great loss is hard to face
Have pity on the young and do not flee
They need our help our aid for we can see
When you are young and have no secure space
Suffering a great loss is hard to face
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Love will need no trick
In my despair I felt that I was stuck
Paralysed by grief and guilt I failed
By the end I had tried every trick
From prayer unthought to deeps of logic black
My life, my engine ,juddered off the rails
I hated God and of “his” Church was sick
Starving and alone I was in shock
The death of one I loved had made me frail
By the end I had tried every trick
I felt Love’s arms around me, death was blocked
I knew this goodness, why else would I wail?
I thought I hated God but Love had struck
Warm and golden light that did me hold
Where are you now when Evil has grown bold?
Kind despair that made me long time sit
By the end I learned Love needs no trick
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Can we be happy when the News is bad
Extract
” Stop telling yourself that you need to feel upbeat, and it begins to seem less pointless to make some tiny effort to address one or two of those problems: to take on a small weekly volunteering role here; to make a modest donation to charity there. The solution to feeling so despairing about the news, in short, is to let yourself feel despairing – and take action, too. “One of the great things about everything being so fucked up,” Jensen likes to say when speaking to audiences, “is that no matter where you look, there’s a lot of work to be done.”
Don’t kid yourself that you will single-handedly eradicate nationwide or global problems; instead, define and pursue small-scale goals, like joining a campaign with some connection to the issues that trouble you the most. Focus on activities you enjoy: these will be much easier to sustain. And there is certainly some relief in attending to your own wellbeing. Exercise, sleep, time spent in nature, meditation and socialising are all proven paths to increased happiness; they’re cliches, but only because they really work – and it isn’t self-indulgent to make time for them.
Paradoxically, it’s through taking action, despite not feeling happy about the situation, that a deeper kind of happiness can arise. (That’s certainly the implication of research on the emotional benefits of volunteering, charitable giving, community involvement and political protest.) Jensen has written that people sometimes ask him why he doesn’t just kill himself, if things are as bad as he says. “The answer is that life is really, really good. I am a complex enough being that I can hold in my heart the understanding that we are really, really fucked, and at the same time that life is really, really good. I am full of rage, sorrow, joy, love, hate, despair, happiness, dissatisfaction, and a thousand other feelings. ”
How my heart sings 