October 17, 2025
Learning
Brunswick Avenue, north of Bloor, has just been resurfaced, which makes flying down the bike lane there there smoothest and most exhilarating experience, and I was doing so not long ago on the most beautiful day (we’ve had a lot of those lately), speeding past the small group gathered at the Little Free Library, perusing the titles available, and there are always people there, a fact which, along with the blue blue sky, underlined me to how just how much the world was beneficent and people were good. And I felt a familiar compulsion to climb up on an online soapbox to declare this fact, because I’m still not entirely over the instinct that a feeling isn’t truly felt until it’s been broadcast on the internet. And thinking about this made me realize how much of my anxiety over the last ten years or more stemmed from me feeling responsible for the world in this way, in proving that hope was reasonable and that we were worth fighting for.
Which is weird, in a way, because doesn’t me feeling like I had to work so hard to make it true suggest I didn’t wholly believe it myself? The other evolution in my thinking since then, in addition to that I’m not responsible for proving the goodness of the world, is that that world actually isn’t good. Or isn’t just good. The way I’d wanted it to be, like managing to get a snapshot, A HA! There, you see, demonstrable evidence! I read a book earlier this year where the author reflected on how she used to think that we were all *this close* to getting on the right track politically, and then everything would be fine after that, and I could so relate to that naivete. And what I understand now is that the world is brutal, terrible, wondrous, perfect, violent, loving, balanced, unfair, beautiful, ugly, predictable, explosive, safe, dangerous, and miraculous all at the same time. The world (and its human inhabitants) are so many things, but “perfectable” isn’t one of them, and maybe I’m learning to accept this? That the world will always be good and bad in equal measure, and we can still love it all the same.
