The Forest For The Trees

Every now and then, in the western world at least, the media get obsessed with something.  Whatever that is, they become consumed by it, and every story that is reported, every TV show that makes references to current affairs mentions it, and slowly you begin to find yourself overwhelmed by an onslaught of information about this one thing that everything becomes a blur.  The things you read become contradictory and confusion inevitably ensues.  For those of a conspiracy loving nature this is a time of revelry as others begin to realise how easily people are influenced by the media.  Tensions begin to rise and disagreements between people with opposing views become ever more deep and resentful.

When the dust settles however there is often a cooling down period where most people begin to awaken from the night before with a hangover that leaves even more disorientation.  When you were focused on one thing for so long and it is suddenly taken away, even when you knew exactly when it would be, you are left with a great gap and that moment of "What did we do before that?" as you try to restore some semblance of normality. 

2016 so far for me has been a year of this for many reasons; some of the issues that have consumed me have been shared issues that many people out there are going through too, others only some of you will be going through, and a handful are personal.  It is perhaps the latter that I have found the hardest to deal with.  Of the former, most are political.  Of latter two, the first are a number of high profile deaths that hit home with me because they were people that I looked up to, or that I admired, or who had been a part of my life in the past and evoke memories of those times.  The second has been a very personal ordeal that I've had to endure, which some of you will know about others won't.  I don't want to give details on here but suffice is to say a very close friend has been through a very worrying struggle health wise and for a while I thought I was going to lose him.

Even now I can feel tears welling admitting that.  These 3 issues are in reverse order of their severity and the level of anxiety I've suffered going through them.  His struggle was the most important, followed by my grief, and finally politics being the last and lowest on the list.  I cite all 3 for a reason however; no matter how insignificant the last one may seem in the long-run, it's hard to remain positive when your vision of the world is clouded by those issues, more so when they have become so overbearing that it's hard to escape them at all.  The only place I've been able to get away from them is by watching old TV shows from a time before they were even an issue.

That causes its own problems however, as many of the old shows I used to watch, are just that - old.  Inevitably with any TV show that ages, so too do the actors, and sadly death is the inevitability with those too.  So on top of a current world filled with uncertainty, and a past world filled with reminders of mortality, and a future that for all intents right now is a black sky with only slithers of light making it through, you can see how it's been very hard to stay positive.  At all.

Through it all, I've felt like I have stood in the middle of a forest of life, but the trees have felt like they have been closing in.  These 3 issues have created a triangle of negativity that's making it hard for me to see anything passed them.  I want out of the forest, I want to lie down in a field and gaze up at the night sky and see the stars and be reminded what hope feels like.