How can beauty and joy and positive things…and suffering and depression and war and rape coexist? How do we deal?

How can we deal with sadness, with fear, with anxiety, with looking at and feeling the suffering of humans, or animals, without getting depressed?

And what is the fruition of opening to this wonderful yet heartbreaking world?

So many of my friends don’t want to hear about factory farming or climate change. They want to be happy. That’s understandable!

The world is beautiful, they tell me. They’re right!

But here’s what’s ugly: ignoring. We can—we must—be able to look with brave vulnerable empathy at world that will soon be roiling in the waves of our self-inflicted climate crisis, that already attacks the weakest and most vulnerable of us. In only a few decades, say, billions of people in India and China will lose their drinking water source–high up in the Himalayas. That will cause more than thirst and death–it’ll cause warfare, looting, rape, suffering untold. Can we avoid it?

Mostly: but only if we don’t ignore.

But it ain’t enough for us to be martyrs for good. It ain’t enough to care. We need to find our joy, too, and remember that this life of ours is precious, and celebrate how beautiful planet of ours.

Here’s a Buddhist poem that sums up this pain/happy contradiction—it helped guide me years ago: