I find that I am constantly confronted with suffering and chaos. It is ever present through social media, television, and the media-saturated world we live in. Sadness screams at us from every screen, casting a cloud of felt sickness and despair that we can’t seem to do anything about. I once heard one of my professors in Communications Studies call this “compassion fatigue.” We are bombarded by the voices of the news that make us feel helpless and guilty. Surely with a world such as this we should do something about it.

I believe seeing the world this way leads not to action, but to a kind of paralysis and dehumanization. We begin to see the world and its people as the dead, dying, and distressed, but we feel powerless to stop or change anything. In that focus on darkness, we forget what makes the atrocities of the world so awful to begin with: the destruction of beautiful, potato loving, culture building, jazz music playing human beings. Violence, illness, and war try with all their powers to deny, discolor, and dilute the true, vibrant, colorful nature of life. When our minds are filled with thoughts of “dying people” and “war,” we forget why it is that we fight against these things: because life, in all its pulsing, hobby filled, giggling reality is beautiful and to be preserved.

This does not mean that we forget the sad things that are happening in the world, or our fellow human beings suffering, or that we don’t fight for what is right and true. Rather, it means that we do not accept darkness as the ultimate reality. It means we dance in defiance, and we sing when the music stops. Only light can put out darkness. Only life can defeat death, and life is made up of a thousand things that never make the news.

Joy Clarkson, "The Importance of Playing the Saxophone"