Welcome to the New Year. I started the new year with the flu so I have changed plans to resting and recovery
and not feeling great. Thankfully I’m getting past that now.
Moving on from the flu, I have many events and adventures in the coming months that I’m excited about.
Yet, Is hard to not have emotions around what is currently happening around us, What the new year has in store
locally, nationally and in the world. I will only mention there is anxiety around political changes and how
that will play out. Many people could see their lives dramatically changed and they are nervous.
Being aware of the news of the day now means facing news of misery and destruction. Currently, the
Los Angeles wildfires is the most dramatic case I have seen where there is video of house after house burning
while we watch. In front of the camera, we see people’s lives go up in flames and there was no way to stop it, It is heart breaking
to watch and we can just now start to imagine what this means for those people and for our nation as a whole. With the changing climate such tragedies will most certainly become more common.
I would like to think about how to engage emotionally as we hear about such misery.
I beleive that one tradgety after another causes emotional overload. I think we are built to care about other people, but when
there is so much tradgedy all at once, then we get overwhelmed as the needs are beyonds us and beyond probably the systems
that are in place to deal with them as well.
The other thing that happens is major climate events get normalized such that major hurricanes and wildfires will
not become such large news events in the future as they become more common. People will be affected by these events and
we will simply not hear much about them.
I certainly do not have answers to how to solve these issues, I do have thoughts about this for myself.
I aim to stay involved in meeting people and hearing their stories. For example, I think I care a little bit
more about the California wildfires and everybody in them, because a cousin was one of the people who lost
his house to the wildfire and and a person I met on a climateride trip lives in a house in danger of being burned.
I also aim to hear about and support people who are working for changes to the systems.
Lastly I to seek to look for and hear about more positive stories.