When so many bad things happen its all you can do to keep perspective. For some reason you wake up each morning. The meter on your life keeps running, but the minutes get more expensive. A personal inventory reveals limbs mostly working, hearing adequate, and eyes still able to recognize the alarm clock. You remind yourself of those people worse off than you, those thousands, those millions, and maybe you have an example or two of a person’s life that is so much more horrible than yours. It’s not that you find happiness in other people’s misery. When the misfortune of others outweighs your own, it makes the setbacks more bearable. So you trudge on, hoping your back wheels aren’t stuck spinning in mud. Each day comes and goes, some better than others. All the while you are waiting. You don’t scream out in frustration too often because you know better: outbursts like that won’t get you anywhere. Belief in God guides many people through times like these but the bad things convince you there is no kind old man above the skies. You move further away from deity worship and closer to situation worship. That is, you accept the situation at hand, offer no explanations, no remedies. You wait.

And then the bad things begin slowly, minutely, accumulating. There are no guarantees that any of this will get better, that the bad will get balanced out by something great, that answers will come, that new paths of discovery will be opened to you. You see no path to follow any more and the future is only a blank sheet of paper with no expectations and little hope. Around you there is love and sadness in a hug by a parked car, hurt in the screaming of a parent at a child in a department store, excitement in new marriage and new ultrasound pictures from expecting parents. There is only this, and this is all.

You wish you would learn something. For example, something to stop you from waiting for things to get better because by now it should be clear that there is no better. Again, you remind yourself that there are people you know with lives overflowing with intense misery and disappointment. There is only right now and the fact that you keep waking up each day, hearing the alarm clock buzz, seeing the time on it, and discovering your limbs still function, mostly.