What is Good and Evil

Watching storms appear and disappear on the radar.  Driest October on record.  Hottest too.  When will we wake up and do something serious about climate change? 

Don't know how people cope with stress.  I'm retired, living the dream, our bills are paid, my husband loves me, I enjoy perfect health yet there is anxiety.  Sometimes, when I'm walking the dogs, I feel if I could just walk fast enough, I'd outrun it.  I'd run except I pay in aches and pains and sleepless nights.  So I walk; faster and faster and faster, like I'm trying to break the sound barrier, or disappear into a wormhole to arrive in another place, another dimension.  Fantastical yes, but it feels like that.  Outstriding stress. 

Then I take a series of deep breaths, get centered, accept that I can't save everything, that pain and suffering and death are as much a part of life as joy and peace and birth. 

It's still the great unanswered conundrum that I've never read an acceptable answer to.  Pain and suffering and death.  If we have the concept of goodness and joy and happiness and it seems to be bred into us to seek it, to celebrate it when we find it, and to castigate ourselves when we are the cause of the loss of it to another being, then why is the world so monstrous? 

I love praying mantis'.  When I find one of the inch long brown ones in the house I carry it outside so the cats won't find it.  But that mantis will catch a bug and eat it alive, starting at the head.  Do we accept and celebrate the cruel as well as the kind?  Is it all, in the end, one and the same?  Do we make a choice, coming down on the side of the Fred Wests, ISIS jihadists and Gacys, finding our happiness, our valid happiness there?  Do we not see the big picture and that's why we get mired in morals and ethics and depression? 

It's not theoretical science to say we are just a collection of oscillating waves and fragments of space that disappear as soon as an attempt is made to quantify them.  So if it's all a dream, do I just embrace the dream, mine and everyone else's as having equal value?  Is there really no good or evil except that I have an opinion of it?

Can't accept that.   Almost a physical sensation of revulsion.

 So guess I must accept the stress of knowing how much pain and suffering and death there is in the world.  And, selfishly, try not to think of it too much.  To keep on taking those deep centering breaths and paint pretty pictures.