These days, all I talk about and think about is the cognitive dissonance required to move through the world. Increasingly, I struggle to disentangle my many selves, to get on with the day. All my selves weep often. I try to have grace. I tell my friends that I’m no longer sure how anyone just drifts through the days, the months, without acknowledging the horrors. I imagine what it must be like to be able to turn off the parts of the world that unsettle you. It must feel like existing in an animated universe that adheres to cartoon physics: you fall from an inconceivable height and, landing, a cloud of dust billows up from the ground, but then you shake yourself off and keep moving.
— Hanif Abdurraqib, from Zohran Mamdani and Mahmoud Khalil are in on the Joke (The New Yorker, July 13, 2025
Notes:
- Thank you Beth @ Alive on All Channels)
- Portrait of Hanif Abdurraqub via Canisius College
Unfortunately we are all interconnected now and it isn’t enough to mind our own business and try to have a good life. We are all affected (in varying degrees) by what is going on in other parts of the world. We have to strive for a good life, all the while defending against those who would happily steal it from us.
Sorry this sounds so negative.
Comment of the Day. Exactly Anneli. Thanks for sharing.
Thanks, DK. Sometimes the old ways were better, but of course I wouldn’t give it up to go back.
Anneli, you put my thoughts in such great words…. I try on a daily basis to NOT get affected by all the horror around us but as much as I’d like to switch it off, I cannot. I tell myself: Change what you can change and accept the things you cannot change….. and then, the moment I lie in my comfy bed, all hell breaks loose. This morning I could hardly get out of bed because at the end of the night I ‘gave a talking’ to our choir (where HH is head conductor – among many other things). My body was rigid with tension and when HH asked what was wrong with me when he saw me contorted with cramps and pain, I told him: I told the choir off and I told them that you have a 100+% full time job, much stress, a not always easy and certainly never enough time, and, and, and. He laughed and said: Thank you …. but we had no problem at all at the last rehearsal! And that’s only a very, very minor event – and not war, gun use, genocide, thiefing, stupidity, or what-not!
Oh, groan. Wrong thing to say. Where is his empathy? That is part of the problem.
oh no, sorry, Anneli, it was his ‘sense of humour’…. which is of a different kind, one very strange to me, but maybe stemming from his part of growing up in a French spoken part of the country and not (ever) understanding ‘our’ humour, which is very quick, often dark, word plays, and ‘loud’. I got used to it – but I would agree with you on the point that this might be one of the few ‘negative’ facts in our long marriage – his ‘never getting it’.
I appreciate your post.
This is reality, sadly.
It’s been hard
I bet. Thanks Sawsan.
moving through our days, while helping those who cannot move through as easily in this current world we are living through
Yes. Well said Beth.
No words….
Yes.
These words made me so sad, mostly because they are (again sadly) so true. I feel often so helpless. (see also my reply to Anneli)
Yes. Agree with you Kiki. And did read your thoughtful comment to Anneli. Thank you for sharing.