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.