Seeing Past My World

I’ve kept my life small lately so to be free of want and envy and comparisons and heartache.

Yet sometimes I drink in the world-at-large—the face of famine, the debris of bombings, the oil-spill carnage, the conflicts of power, the current trends in popular everything. It adds context to my too-small life, gives me perspective.

This morning I randomly opened a Paula Fox book and this jumped out from its pages:

“You can hold back from the suffering of the world, you have free permission to do so, and it is in accordance with your nature, but perhaps this very holding back is the one suffering you could have avoided.”
—Franz Kafka

It’s a call to action, isn’t it? I’ve been hearing it for a while now—a whisper from a distance—but Kafka pushes it close and turns up the volume.

It’s time to change my life. Again. I’m just not yet sure how.

[Art by Caspar David Friedrich.]