Sep 28, 2016 Daily Life, Ramblings and Musings

Sum Total
©Sept. 28th, 2016
By Vijaya Sundaram

There are days like these (actually, for me, it’s pretty much all the time), when the sensation of living in several parallel dimensions of reality seem heightened:

There’s pleasure in sitting with a steaming cup of Madras filter-coffee, watching squirrels and other small critters racing around in the backyard, watching the muted light filtering through the fir tree in the backyard, letting my eyes rest upon the discs of colored class on my window ledge.

There’s some distress in hearing my daughter in the other room sniffling with a cold (for which I’ve made her several, but several, cups of turmeric-honey-fresh-lemon-fennel-cumin-pepper tea), but knowing she’s just got a cold is reassuring. It will pass.

There’s happiness in knowing that Holly is recovering from her dog-bite wound (which caused her and all of us great distress and many tense days of going back and forth to the Emergency Vet Hospital), and seems to be perfectly well now.

There’s joy in knowing my husband’s back from being away in Toronto for four days, and we’re all home together.

There’s happiness in knowing my daughter and I will soon be seeing my mother and other family members in India (traveling by Emirates tomorrow).

And there’s great sorrow in knowing that people around the world are suffering in ways I cannot even imagine.

There’s grief and anger that tens of thousands of species of animals and insects are disappearing each year, and that WE are the direct (and indirect) cause of this catastrophe.

And there’s great frustration and fear in knowing that the CO2 levels in our atmosphere have passed 400 ppm.

And still, I can dance on this side of the edge of happiness.

We need to raise the sum total of happiness in the world.

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Tags: #ClimateChangeisReal, #personal, #PleasureInDailyLife, #Species Extinction