Making Art While Nothing Makes Sense

I’ve been in a pensive, brooding mood. News of bombs falling on civilians and nuclear plants will do that.

How are we still doing this, going to war, in 2022? Have we learned nothing? How does a species who can travel into space and look at planet Earth from above, still have it in their hearts and minds to destroy each other, communities, cities, with weapons?

No answers.

I turn to philosophy to quiet my mind, to contemplate the questions about the horrors that are being inflicted. But I find no answers there, only more questions.

Walking then, my great solace. The thing that has been my constant go-to. 

Painting perhaps. It’s a way to lose myself in creating.

Reading. But I flit from book to book, three on the go, none quite completed. I need light reading, something to transport me, take me to another place. 

And yet, guilt, even as I am transported. How can my life be so easy, so smooth? What have I done to deserve this? But guilt about the comfort and ease of one’s own life, serves no one. It only serves to make us feel slightly better about ourselves, as if we’re excusing our own comfortable life by feeling guilty about it. Guilt is misplaced unless it spurs one to do better, take some corrective action. What action? 

I turn on the news and listen, watch, because we must be witnesses to others’ suffering.

I am reminded of the time some thirty years ago, soon after I’d had my daughter, when two families in southern Ontario were going through the horror of losing their teenage daughters to atrocious crimes. I read the newspaper accounts of it daily. Not because I wanted to. But because I felt I was honour-bound, as a new mother, to witness the grief of those other mothers. 

We often think we shouldn’t watch or listen to bad news because of how it affects us. And, in some cases, that might be true, if one is suffering from anxiety or depression. But the rest of us cannot ignore what our fellow human-beings are enduring. Their story must be witnessed. Their story must be told.

Again I ask myself – what action? Donating? Creating? Witnessing?

Those seem like the only options. 

And so I do. But still it seems self-serving.