Bad Mornings Require Goodness

   "I'll tell them how I survive it.  I'll tell them that on bad mornings, it feels impossible to take pleasure in anything because I'm afraid it could be taken away.  That's when I make a list in my head of every act of goodness I've seen someone do.  It's like a game.  Repetitive.  Even a little tedious after more than twenty years."  -- the final paragraph in Mockingjay, the third in The Hunger Games series by Suzanne Collins

    
     The heroine in the story, Katniss Everdeen, shares these thoughts in the closing moments of the book I just finished earlier tonight.  They struck a chord, stirring a hum which resonated to the very core of me, the way lines of truth tend to do when I come across them in my literary outings.  I highlighted them in orange.  Tucked them away for later contemplation for this blog.  There's something there which needs saying.

     Only I'm not sure just what.  But if I wait, it may not be allowed the chance to flesh out the skeleton of an idea, my days being what they are in this chaotic unnatural suburban landscape, so I'll attempt to describe what is barely there.

     Katniss' childhood was a bleak existence.  She found ways to move within that bleakness and still retain a measure of who she was.  At some point, she became a pawn in a game not within her control though she exerted great effort to regain a portion of control.  People, those close to her, many who were not, were lost along the way.  Her guilt over surviving, misplaced feelings that her ability to keep her head above water while often better folks around her succumbed to great pain and death, made life an impossible bit of business for her internally.  Externally, she kept about the actions of living and rolling with the bruising punches.  This is a gross simplification without benefit of the complicated plot line.

     I identify with Katniss in those words of hers.  A great many unknown to me likely do, too.  A difficult childhood.  The isolation which can come with that.  The supreme effort to rise above and even appreciate the lessons of that childhood.  Working through experience and faith to build an understanding of past events in order to translate them into an operational vehicle for future events.  Coming to a place at some point where the two collide with a thunderous clap which leaves the ears ringing.  Looking around with the realization that though you now stand, several in the collision did not emerge as whole as you.  Or at least as whole as you appear.  The scene of the accident must be cleared, bodies dragged to the side, glass and debris swept away, and witnesses debriefed.  When the emergency crew finally leaves with the unfortunate victims, you are able to walk away with only the collective dust about your person.  And the memories for everlasting company.

     When you know that while you narrowly escaped an existence of desperation and strife that has succeeded in trapping others, large numbers of others on a world scale, a significant gallery of others in your close circle, it is difficult to enjoy the the life on the other side of that escape.  No matter if you tried to save the others.  No matter if you were willing to sacrifice yourself.  No matter if you, too, bear scars of a lesser degree but painful all the same.  No matter if you pulled yourself up by the bootstraps to make the most of your blessed lot.  But unlike Katniss' words, it's more than the fear that you might  lose it all.  It's even more than fear, really.  It's the expectation that anyone's carpet can be pulled from under them at any given moment, and with so many suffering so much so regularly, why get too comfortable. 

     But even more than that, it's unfair.  To have wonderful friends, a spacious home, food whenever the belly desires, safety to be a woman and a Christian and an individual, while over 90% of the world's population struggles just to find adequate water or shelter or food for a day.  To sit securely at a laptop and discuss with an invisible audience a reflective moment while a brother and sister wrestle the demons which followed them up through the years of their youth into their troubled adult lives.  And even this is a gross simplification of an infinitely complex timeline which is yet projecting into the years ahead.  All of it unfair.  Not fair.  Which I tell my kids constantly is how it is.  I want them to be prepared when it hits.  Over and over and over again.

     So there are mornings when I rise, mornings when people in other myriad walks of life rise, and we begin the difficult chore of accepting the next 24 hour stretch as a gift of which we are worthy to partake.  We remind ourselves of the goodness out there being enacted by others, even trying to believe that we might have done a few good things along the way, to balance the paralyzing awareness that incredible amounts of suffering go on way beyond our power to control or change.  Without my faith in the Lord, I would be paralyzed; with it, I yet struggle with holding on to hope.  It is a bit repetitive.  It can be a tedious exercise as the decades stack up. 

     And it is survival, if not of the fittest, at least of the 'attempting to be fit.'