Nangle Natters: The end is nigh?

How was your weekend? Grand. Brilliant. Without a lapse in the marvellous good times?

How are you feeling? Like crap. Everything’s rubbish. What – not even bunny videos can crack a smile? Well, maybe a twitchy nose offers a bit of respite.

I’ve been hearing a lot of polarisation of feelings, that only gets amplified in the echo chamber of social media. Everyone is scared. Everyone is suspicious. Everyone is overwhelmed by global affairs. All of the time. 24 hours a day. And nobody is sleeping – ever – despite the onslaught of suggested remedies that can be found in the Facebook thread.

And if you read or say these things enough times it’s as if they become the truth. It’s like when you half remember a conversation with a friend and then realise it was between Samwise and Frodo in last week’s Lord of the Rings marathon. I’ll remember a story I told about an event sometimes better than the event itself. Mark Thomas’ The Red Shed show last year spent a long time with him trying to research whether his own memory was true or just a good story he’d retold a lot and now believed. We’re good at convincing. Especially if the outcome is a lot more simple than the truth.

I like to remind myself that how I feel now is not how I feel always. And that goes for the good times as well as the bad.

I’m riding high, having a glorious day out with my best beloved, just the two of us, grinning like fools – and I’ll quietly take a mental snapshot. This is a good time. And I’ll file it away to remember when things aren’t so rosy or sunny.

I feel like news is being shouted at me with perspective losing out to volume far too many times

When I hear that Russia is repealing laws protecting women from domestic violence, when all I see are articles fearing international despotic rulers and their increasingly erratic behaviour, it can leave me flinching at every news source. Believing that this is ‘always’ and how it is in every corner of the globe. Which it isn’t. As frequent articles from Canada and Scandinavia encouragingly proclaim.

I think what I’m trying to say is; everything changes. Seems basic enough but as generalisations are bandied about and hysterical reactions encouraged – everywhere from Big Brother to CNN – it’s good to know that this moment in time is not how things will always be. They’re also not the full story. Imagine the reels of news stories that came out during World War Two and compare it to the libraries of books that are now written trying to explain even just a fraction of what happened. I feel like news is being shouted at me with perspective losing out to volume far too many times.

The big thing to take into account is how much we can affect what is yet to come – what the change from now will move into. It’s far too easy to despair of ‘people’ – people are the ones that got us into this almighty pit of a mess, they’re all yucky, and let’s put up a wall to keep them away. Oh, now no one is here to help me change a duvet cover.

‘People’ are the ones who introduced the National Health Service to us less than 70 years ago. They’re the ones who more recently brought gay marriage into law in this country. People went on marches all over the world to have their voices heard only last month.

Everything is not terrible and everything is not brilliant. We don’t live in a screen print of black and white. And if it feels like we are, surely that’s the best time to stop and seek out the finer shades and colours of the world.