Not doing enough?

Sometimes we feel as if a current crisis could be resolved if we worked harder, thought harder and so on. We assume that we are not doing everything possible, everything in our power to fix the crisis. This can lead to severe mental stress, we feel guilty, weak and angry at ourselves for not doing enough, for not doing everything possible, for letting the crisis continue.

But this is a wrong way of thinking. We must acknowledge our limits, and we must acknowledge that sometimes even though we could have done more, we ultimately didn't and this happened for various reasons. It is not that there was a giant obstacle, but sometimes even trivial issues can be an obstacle to our functioning. The workers who are watching the patients afflicted with Ebola die in front of their eyes, unable to help, knowing that these people have no chance of survival - how terrible they must feel, how helpless, how angry, and yet they might think they could do more, perhaps they could organise protests to get the pharmaceutical giants to work harder on finding a cure, perhaps they could work harder on each patient to make them more comfortable, and so on.

This was an extreme example, but all of us have faced this problem, in issues both big and small, and we know in our hearts that the feeling of helplessness and remorse is no less strong simply because the issue at hand is small.

We can see the reason, but our heart rejects it, perhaps we need more maturity to accept that the world is chaotic, and out of the blue bad things happen which affect us severely. Things which we cannot control and cannot mitigate, but are forced to watch helplessly as it takes its course, all the while an inner voice chastises us for being weak, ineffective and passive. Is a reconciliation possible - I hope there is - but as of now, I do not see one.

The moment of despair

There are moments when I feel so trapped that destruction feels like the best option. There are no exits in those moments, no possibility of a window opening up, of a ray of sunshine coming through some long forgotten opening in some corner of the prison. Those times are dark, and I do not like the darkness. I look for an opening, fully sure that I will not be able to find one, and yet the realisation of that fact hits me so hard every time. It's a wash-dry-repeat cycle of despair. There are only two options you have when you find yourself in a prison like that – try to escape, or forget somehow that you are trapped.

Escape from this prison is impossible; in the many years I have been here I have not seen one opening that a mouse could crawl through. Making an opening for myself is a courageous thought, but the walls of this prison is invisible. So far, each time, I have chosen the second option, to forget where I am, to rip my mind away from the fact of my imprisonment to something else. When the walls are invisible, it can actually be done for a moment, until the inevitable stimuli that lies waiting brings me back to reality again, and the cycle continues.

There is a third option, and that is the most effective, most brutal one. There can be no prison without a prisoner, and even if the prison cannot be destroyed, the prisoner can be. I have not taken that step yet, I like to hold it as a trump card, to have, literally, the last laugh at the prison. But hope still calls to me, and I wait for something to tip the scales and break the cycle, one way or another.