Lack of Focus

This week it has been hard to write.
I have found myself overwhelmed by events occurring all over the world:  here at home and abroad.  To someone like myself, who is a perennial worrier, these sorts of things send me into an almost frenzy.

Honest to goodness, it really feels like order - internal, national, international - is completely falling apart.  Or accelerating beyond what seems to be manageable.

I know there are those that would tell me that I am simply being too focused on certain thing and that overall things are much better than I believe them to be.  But I am student of history and I know all too well how fragile any complex system like civilization can be, how easily it fractures and how those fractures have to start somewhere - sometimes in less obvious places but eventually spreading throughout the entire structure.

One could perhaps avert one's eyes to the cracks growing larger and perhaps part of me wants to continue to do this.  But the other side of me - the paranoid side?  - keeps whispering in my head that avoiding things too long will eventually result in being overrun by events instead of being prepared for them.

Two futures keep arguing for attention in my head:  the one is the future that conforms to the present, the one that resembles life as it is today except with better technology, the sort of relative stability that I experience now.  The other future is the one unknown, the one that could be any combination of events and experiences - except there is no relative stability involved.

Everywhere things seem on fire.  It makes my day to day activities seem relatively unimportant and even pointless.  It splits my focus and makes it difficult to plan for any future, as how does one prepare for two entirely separate time streams?

And even as I dither, the world spins on, slowly seeming to become even more engulfed by flame.