From January blues to eternal hopes

I've never been a cynical person. But today, I came within a stone's throw of the precipice, inhaling the fumes of profound hollowness that comes with being a cynic. It was not a good place to be, to be sure, cowering under all the bad news cropping up around the world like mushrooms after a heavy rain. Usually I can handle the torrent, but today was not one of those days. Today was about being stared in the face by Hopelessness and Despair. By Questions like how one can sleep at night? What is the point of it all? Why try to make the world a better place when one's actions seem to barely cause a ripple in the ocean that's been caught in a rip of Bad News? Why not just end everything now, with the eager help of the oil and shale gas industries, of course? Am I not becoming a cynic??

Fortunately, I eventually managed to retard these destructive thoughts. As cliché as it sounds, my saving grace was meeting up with a 13-year-old child who I regularly mentor at a neighbourhood secondary school. Coaching him on geometry today made me realise not only that I've retained something from the mind-numbing maths lessons of my school days, but that - more importantly - if I give up on humanity, I will necessarily be giving up on people like him (he wants to be a graphic designer, bless). And so, while my mentee was grappling with the difference between a scalene and isosceles triangle, I concluded that it is because of the current existential crisis faced by all Earthlings that I must never give up the hope that life can and will continue to thrive on Earth. It would not only be unethical and a great shame for us not to at least try to make the planet a beautiful and habitable place once more for future generations; it would be mighty disrespectful to all those courageous souls in history who died fighting for a more just world (as well as those highly intelligent souls who invented the likes of geometry). 

And so: terrible events may happen all the time, but it is up to those who are able – like myself – to continue battling with a steeliness that's couched with the one emotion that unites us all – love. And whenever a crisis of confidence presents itself, as it is bound to over and over on this journey to salvation, it is imperative that we reflect on the sacrifices others made in order for us to be. Now that I'm studying biology, I am appreciating for the first time just how miraculous life is. There are possibly millions of ways that life can go wrong. A lack of an enzyme or protein here retarding normal development or a missing gene there causing cancer. And yet, statistically speaking, it's rare that nature, when left it to its own devices, gets it wrong. In other words, things often go wrong because we make it go wrong. So, on the flipside, we have the power to make things right again. At least, that's the hope.