cognitive dissonance, anybody?
I mean, come on. on the very same page!
I tried to think, the other day, about how every time someone is senselessly killed or shot, somebody close to them is experiencing the categorically worst moment of their lives. when I try to multiply that in my head, I suddenly glimpse the swollen, overwhelming sadness of things ... and there are times when I'm attending to some unrelated matter, when that sense of unfathomable sadness visits itself upon me, unbidden & often unwanted.
I wonder sometimes whether we have an obligation to remember in this way, to think for a moment outside the padded walls of our own lives -- whether the sense of helpless anguish I experience from momentarily tuning into such sadness makes up in any way for my complete inability to do anything about it (it doesn't). I wonder, if there do exist angels, whether the burden of world misery is their lot to bear, to remember sadness when no one else does -- so that we may ourselves be saved from an eternity of grief, except in the occasional moments when I am, say, peeling carrots into the sink, and am suddenly visited by an unbidden, unwanted teardrop of one such angel.