Too Depressing For Me Right Now.

Hope is essential.

With that frame of mind I posited that the answer is thinking of yourself as better, and then living up to your thoughts. No matter how low we are, we can imagine better and we can strive to achieve the better; as long as we have hope. I am pointing towards inspiration and aspiration, which is a grand and joyous place from which to work in the world, and what I say is also true in a life that is overwhelmingly bleak and mean. Thinking ourself better isn't just about the grand and joyous. It's also about continuing in the face of overwhelming everyday challenges. It's about getting out of bed to feed our family in the face of depression, it's about overcoming substance abuse, and sometimes it's about just not quitting.

A comment I received on that post (thanks, Maeke!) points to the reality of a different frame of mind. What if you don't live up to your thinking -- in other words, what if you aren't as good as you think? Setting your sights high and failing is tough and can kill hope. From this perspective, starting with "thinking ourselves better" is irrational. You are what you are, and thinking yourself as better than you are is delusional.

I find this argument to also be true and I also say that one person's delusion has always been another's inspiration. In fact, Jesus and Gandhi and the others all faced being called delusional and worse, and all went through times when they almost gave up -- and then they went and did what they did anyway.

So, I stand by the hopeful mindframe. When we fail and feel the darkness of despair murking up our mind, we must have hope and set ourselves on that course towards better.

And here is where I am failing at that right now: The Chesapeake Bay is dying.

We are choking it to death. Our sewage and the run-off from our farms and lawns is pumping nitrogen and phosphorous at toxic rates into our streams and rivers and then the Bay which leads to blooms of algae and other guck which suck all of the oxygen from the water -- creating miles of lifeless underwater Mars-scape.

We aren't alone of this of course, as a huge zone of death dances around in the Gulf of Mexico at the mouth of the Mississippi River, too.

We, the people who live around the Bay, and our governments have so far proven impotent against this threat. Every few years the powers that be decide the goals that were set a few years ago were just too ambitious, and they re-issue new goals that being more "realistic" are also more like worthless. Meanwhile, very little changes and less progress is made.

You'd think people who love the Bay as much as we do would see what is happening -- everyone does -- and DO SOMETHING ABOUT IT. But that hasn't happened yet.

This is where I feel like maybe we can't do it. Maybe we just don't have the perspective and the political will to change what we do so we don't kill the Bay. Maybe we shouldn't try to be better than we have been. Maybe we are just flawed to such a degree that we should just try for an "undemanding attempt with no guarantees."

Maybe we should despair.


(photos courtesy of ChesapeakeBay.Net)