Whispering Wyrd

I’ve been feeling a weird and persistent heaviness lately, a sadness I just haven’t been able to explain or completely put my finger on. The recent birth of my grandson is certainly joyous, and I couldn’t be happier about that, but this feeling still just hangs on. Sometimes putting a name to a feeling helps me address it properly, but I just couldn’t find the right word for this one. At first I thought it was melancholy, but that isn’t exactly right either. I think the most correct word for what I’ve been feeling is weltschmerz. It’s German and literally means something like “world pain.” That’s pretty darn accurate for what I’ve been feeling.

I’ve noticed that since getting clean I don’t have a thick skin anymore. It’s like I’ve gone from one extreme to another. When I was drinking and taking drugs my heart was cold as ice and hard as stone. Nothing really affected me. It wasn’t just the alcohol and drugs either, I had so much anger in me that very little if anything could get through it. Disasters didn’t faze me except maybe to make me even angrier. Compassion just wasn’t something I possessed much of back then. I know It’s awful but I lived with an attitude of “As long as it doesn’t affect me or mine, we’re good.”

But now it’s different. Now I seem to feel everything. Not just notice it, but feel it deeply. The hate, the wars, the violence, the cruelty, and the apathy in the world affecting me in ways they never ever used to before. That’s one reason I stopped reading the news and headlines a while back. It was wrecking me. But even when I avoid the noise I’m still aware of what’s happening around me.

Then recently there was a murder that, for reasons of privacy, I won’t go into detail about even though it has now made national news. I didn’t personally know the person but it still hit me hard because I know people who did know them and loved them. I guess it’s a case of their pain becoming my pain. When people I care about are hurting I hurt too.

It feels like all the other grief and heaviness in the world had already been piling up inside me, wobbling unstably and this latest thing was enough to make it all come crashing down. I found myself shocked by how much hatred exists in the world. Hate that gets so big it destroys lives.

I’m not naive about violence. A good part of my younger years were spent around people of extreme violence. You never knew when something was going to pop off. I learned to harden myself in order to survive it. I drank and used drugs because of it. Maybe this change in me is age or maybe it’s being clean and sober. Or maybe a combination of both, I don’t know.

But I do know that the suffering in the world affects me deeply now even when it doesn’t directly involve me personally. For a while I really didn’t know what to do with that feeling because I felt completely powerless against it. Then earlier today during a conversation I got some good advice and realized something…

I can’t stop all the hate and violence in the world and I can’t fix humanity. But I can make my own tiny little part of the world better. I can make my small square foot of the world a safer and kinder place.

I can show up for the people in my orbit. I can support people when they’re hurting. I can check on them, listen to them, share food, offer kindness, and help my immediate community however I can. None of that will change the whole world but it can change somebody else’s world in that particular moment.

Just family taking care of family and neighbors taking care of neighbors. Just human beings refusing to lose their kindness in a world that seems absolutely determined to rip itself apart on a daily basis. Then the weltschmerz eases up a little, at least for now.

Amituofo
~Buck