Pain transmission II

Well, is there?

I'm giving more money to charities, which is not enough.

Campaigning? I don't believe it's right to tell other people what they should think or feel. I don't value gimmicky stunts. I'm not prepared to tin-rattle at other people when I can directly give more myself. (This train of thought always ends in donation.)

Educating: yes. I believe in education. But I'm ignorant in the face of the deep-rooted and tangled, eternally complex social and political circumstances behind the news stories. And you can't educate from a position of ignorance.

Well, I suppose the response is there, isn't it? I need to know more about some really important things, I need to get more clued-up about the work that different charities do, and what's actually going on under my nose. It's been a long time since I did any actual, practical volunteer work.

Not enough time in the day or hours in the week. But getting the priorities straight: life's too short NOT to try and make a change, I suppose.

I wonder how long this resolution will last? How do I make it more realistic? Might have to be small scale. OK. The commitment is: pay more attention to the way that I translate my beliefs and ideology into the habits of my daily life.

Worth a try.

Pain transmission

I've got a completely different view of pain these days. It's familiar now in new, physical and emotional dimensions. I've got more respect for pain, and more understanding of how little I know of it. Pregnancy and childbirth put me through my paces, but motherhood makes you feel other people's pain, too.

All the suffering that's broadcast in the news at the moment, it is all real, it all comes home. I was numb to this before. Now I understand that every infant and every adult who suffers in wars, in hunger, in poverty - they are all someone's child. This must sound familiar to any regular church-goer. Well, I'm not - but even so I have echoed the sentiment in the past, imagining that I was imagining how terrible it all was. I wasn't, I can't.

I've taken a few days off work, and it's not quite been the alcohol and caffeine-fuelled knees up that I was hoping for. A side effect of the mental decompression from just... stopping is that I've paid more attention to the reported news.

I don't really have words at the moment to think or process all of it: the Victorian-age inequalities exacerbated by welfare cuts; the utter, brain-numbing awfulness of one couple's self-serving behaviour; the scale of the refugee crisis in Syria...

Is there anything we can do?