Getting A Grip

Used to be something called The Grippe which was the same thing as we call influenza today.  I recall grandparents calling their suitcases, "grips". And then again, we have gripes. The latter is what I feel sometimes. I have a gripe, not that it is pronounced the same as the other "grips". My gripe is about  all the bad news we receive every day: bombings, shootings, riots and arrests of the innocent. The media, doesn't spend much time looking for pleasant things to write of or speak about or show. When things are going along too well in our safe areas, The Media reaches out anywhere in the world to find bad news. The worst part of it is that we, The Public, seem to eat it up. Bad news headlines catch our eye.  It's a bit like driving past a car accident and slowing down, not for safety sake, but to see if someone were badly hurt. If you deny this, you are likely telling yourself a fib. But wait, we aren't meanies, out being nasty bad news bears, we happen to belong to a sympathetic group of creatures who are bent on helping each other. Even when we are gawkers, there is a positive reason at the bottom of it. We have a natural good Samaritan in most of us, that thinks just maybe we can do some good if we come across a bad situation. We can't help it, it's our nature. And once in awhile, that element of our human psyche, is one that actually does save lives: giving CPR, standing back when we are told, calling 911 when it's needed, offering a hug or kind word. But the "grip" I am thinking of is what we have to seek out when the bad news is so bad or there is so much of it, we start to slide down the slippery slope of depression. We need to get a grip. We feel helpless that we can't do anything for the huge numbers of people who are in horrendous situations. We think of the innocent children caught in these moving hordes of our fellow world beings who have lost everything while we, here, live in relative comfort. We donate, we watch and care but fail to understand how human beings can treat each other so heartlessly in the name of political, religious or economic greed. Not all of us can rush off to help, even though we might like to. We do the best we can in small ways, and then we have to find peace in our own lives knowing that we have so much to be thankful for. The world has always had strife and it does bear thought, but how does one live knowing so. We can do what we can in our small ways, but we also have to find happiness in our own lives. We can do something nice for someone else no matter how small it is. A smile, a kind word, a happy greeting, are things that make not only others  feel better, but also, ourselves. We can love our families and spend more time with them. We can offer our friends and neighbours hearing ears and pleasant words. We don't need to bake cookies or cakes and deliver them, we need simply to take time to look around us and appreciate what we have, small as it may seem and share the positiveness in some way. We need to try and tip the balance, in our own ways in our own spaces, toward the positive. We need to get a grip.