firstly! congratulations on doing the bar, that is a huge accomplishment and i hope you are very proud of yourself and rewarding yourself with lots of good relaxation experiences. secondly! i find your stance on humanity really refreshing and interesting. it’s so easy to get cynical and caught up in all the terrible things humans do, which i tend to do a lot. i was wondering if you would talk a bit more about how you stay positive and remember the good in things :) if that’s personal no worries!

notbecauseofvictories:

Well, right now I’m in Philadelphia (where I’m moving for an amazing attorney position) and I’m sitting in my best friend of eight years’ place, after we saw an apartment, got ice cream, made dinner, talked about—everything, so many things, all of them meaningful or lighthearted, and important to me or her or both of us.

So I’m pretty good.

It’s funny you ask me this question, though, because it’s something I’ve been struggling with a lot in the last couple years. (The state of the world being what it is.) And what it comes down to, for me, is a question of framing. No one questions there are bad things happening in the world, if your optimism is founded on bad things not happening, then you’re going to be largely disappointed.

But bad things don’t happen in a vacuum. We aren’t living in an amoral universe, or if we are, humans ascribe a hell of a lot of morality to it—to the point where bad things happen, and people are offended by it. People get angry. Then they get angrier. People want answers to why the bad thing happened, and how to stop the bad thing; some people even give up their relative comfort and dedicate their lives to stopping the bad thing, or risk violence and death and arrest to stop the bad thing; after the dust has cleared, they question whether, now that we’ve theoretically stopped the thing, was that sufficient? Were we really addressing the bad thing, or are there other things we should be doing instead, to stop that bad thing more completely and effectively?

In these days and times I cling, so strongly, to the fact that I am not alone in my anger and confusion. No one is. There are people standing alongside me who are even more angry, more disappointed; that I share a world with the angriest people you could find. I’m such a mild optimist, I get disappointed and depressed when I find out the world doesn’t obey my rules. When people let me down, when we aren’t our best or even our mediocre, I just have feelings. 

Some people have riots.

I take incredible heart in that. However bad the world gets, people are there, ahead of and with me, and they’re fucking pissed. The universe can never be truly amoral. because there are those people, and I can trot after them, believing in goodness and truth and love because there’s also this profound and complete anger. It races ahead, a product of fury, faith and conviction. (It’s hard to communicate to the more comfortable people in my life, but it exists, and endures, and anger that demands an answer. Jesus had a whip of cords, modernity has more weapons at its disposal.)

And then, at the end of the day, I spent a couple hours sitting outside a park, watching a bunch of kids between 7 and 12 play one of those inexplicable circle games—I watched them for an hour and genuinely could not tell you the rules. But the sun was weakly out, and there was green grass, and children of various colors bouncing a blue ball on the concrete. I wasn’t hungry, and I wasn’t anything, and sitting there, I thought—jesus, I am so profoundly lucky. To be sitting here, content in my safety, warm in the sun, watching this. Children, also safe, playing a stupid game I don’t understand except they’re standing in a circle with a blue ball and playing it.

The universe doesn’t guarantee our safety and happiness. Even other people don’t guarantee our safety and happiness, and they actually have an active will that could make a promise like that. But despite that, safety and happiness exist.

Terrible things happen, and despite that, good things happen too. You can either focus on the former, or the latter.

Your choice.