All Gloom and Doom

I've been posting a lot on this blog.  It's just been all in my head, rather than actually on the computer, so you haven't seen it.

For example, I was thinking about a post where I wrote about how strange it is that I'm thirty-two years old, and only just now have discovered how amazingly delicious pomegranates are.  How is it that I only recently had one for the first time?  And how great that little things like that come my way, to remind me that everything is not old, that I have things to experience and see for the first time still?

I also wanted to write about how I'm really hoping I get to go to India for work in January, and how scary and awful it is to leave my family for such lengths of time, and how incredibly exciting it would be for me to get to go!  To India!

Or, I could be writing about how the whole family was sick again the last few days, and how hard this is.  That I curled up and cried on the couch for an hour Monday morning because I was just so sick and tired, but the girls and Eric were home, and were sick and tired, and I couldn't just be sick and tired but also had to be mom and wife.  I just wanted for a little while to disappear.  Really.  I didn't get to, though, and this made me angry.  And then I felt guilty for being such a baby, and for feeling angry.  But that's where I was.

Mostly, I think I've been a little depressed, and have been in a bit of an existential crisis, I guess.  It seems to me that we're really in for it in the next fifty years or so, what with peak oil and global warming, and I'm mostly terrified about the whole thing, and it's coloring everything I do.  I look out of my beautiful house at the leaves wafting down out of the trees, and wonder if they will be alive when my kids are grown.  I worry there won't be enough water to drink, or that my girls will be at war, or will be raped and killed.  I wonder if I should continue teaching and pouring money into a 401k and dealing with trivial shit I don't care about.  Probably not.

Writing this down, I see how crazy it all looks.  And I have been feeling crazy, for sure.  And mad.  And sad.  But in the meanwhile my life is sort of passing me by, and if all this bad stuff does come to pass--which it might not (I mean, the goodness of the world is great, despite what it seems sometimes)--then I'll sure be pissed I didn't enjoy this time more.  My negativity isn't going to help much, especially if it's not focused into action, that's for sure.

I guess I just feel possessed by the weight of it, the badness in the world, and have been sucked under a little.  I probably also have been working too much and have not been meditating enough, and definitely haven't been exercising as much.  So I've been ignoring my best tools in the fight against the gloom.  Best to go back, to tend my own garden for a little while, and then figure out how to re-enter the fight not quite so heavy.