The Pollyanna Principle

"I arise in the morning torn between a desire to improve the

 world and a desire to enjoy the world. This makes it hard to 

plan the day."

For years I've been trying to draw a line in the sand but the tide comes in and washes it away.  Sometimes a fair west wind bends down to blow loose grains over it and covers all traces of its existence, fragmenting my desire for juxtaposition.  How am I supposed to objectively analyze and separate when the line keeps disappearing?  

Our world is a complex web of goodness and heinousness and each day, as a citizen of it, I have choices.  The goodness is the easy part.  It's what to do with the heinous that troubles me.  

My line in the sand would separate the "fear, fight and worry" instinct in me from the "ostrich" instinct: a head in the sand keeps you blind to it all.  How does a body know on which side to stand when the line keeps drifting, disappearing from view.  

I naturally gravitate to "ostrich", or at least suffusing the ugly with rose colored glasses.  Not always safe or realistic but it makes me feel good in the short term.  In reality, I can be a lot like a child, covering my ears and "la la-ing" loudly, hoping it will all go away.

On the other hand, fear can stimulate anger which, in turn, should stimulate positive action.  But where is that line?  How can I strike a healthy balance?  

Many days the voice of the doomsdayer closes in on me, like walls in a night terror - economic collapse, the imminence of a world war, political deceipt and corruption, big corporation control, environmental destruction, my children's world going ass over tea kettle.  

I don't have the answers yet.  I listen ever so carefully to my heart and my head - they usually disagree.  So I wait, rose colored glasses propped vigilantly at the end of my nose. And I look in the rear view, believing that, in the end, goodness always prevails and something fortuitous can arise from the smoke of any situation.  

Call me a dreamer, but I happen to be an optimist.  I don't believe in arbitrary happenstance or a capricious god.  I believe in humankind.  Life is too short for anything less.