Revolting. Again.
One eye gropes its way into the new day. The other checks the outside — grey, or greyer. The gathering light coaxes in fresh spirits and nudges out the old ones of the night.
Today is different. Today it creeps back. That feeling I had pushed away, the one that always knows the address: revolting despair.
Gone today is the usual overdose of lust for life. Today the joy of plain living has left me. The news comes like water under the door. I can’t handle the flood. I can’t even go around it.
Every morning a wave takes hold of me. The wave from the unimaginable, the inhuman, the unspeakable, dripping out of every channel. And then it surfaces, creeping and fatalistic: the urge to crawl back into bed, pull the duvet over your head, and forget.
How long will the forgetting last? Or do anything at all?
No. And no again. That doesn’t work either. What reasonably empathetic person can close their eyes to the state of the world and its politics, switch off their mind, put their heart on emergency power? Sure, I’ve tried. Again and again, before the revolting stuff could grab me by the collar during my morning news. But since yesterday it’s all been too much to ask.
Yesterday there was no Morgensplitter story.
Not for lack of time.
Not for lack of ideas.
No — for lack of something human. Lack of bearings, perhaps. Or the absence of the usual lever that connects hope to action.
“Spit on your hands and do something!”
The spit isn’t there. The hands have no strength.
No, I am not being self-pitying or deserving of sympathy. Sorry. But I allow myself moments of despair. I give myself the time to simply be disgusted. That time is over. This morning, here, now. Full stop.
I haven’t looked at the news yet before writing this. The fight that’s woken up again in me — against fatalism, against warmongering, for what human rights are still supposed to mean — I won’t let the flood of news take that from me.
No Effing Way. (Translation not available.)
Back to basics: call friends, check in with neighbours, put ideas on the table. What Homo Sapiens has always done when things got tight.
And in my case, I change the perspective. Because that’s what makes hidden ideas and possibilities visible.
I’m going to plant a tree now.
So my grandchildren can sit in the shade.
