Are you cozy?

It’s another wet morning. The heat is on. I have no plans to leave the compound today. I plan to be cozy. So many people in the world never know cozy. The suffering of only one is barely imaginable, but multiply that by millions and it seems almost beyond the ability of my mind or my heart to comprehend. And yet, I’m bombarded day after day, hour after hour with tales of mass and individual suffering from all corners of the globe. I’m torn between my basic human responsibility to mitigate and alleviate suffering, and the sheer scale and complexity of the problems and my seeming powerlessness in the face of it all. Usually, my reaction is paralysis, indecision, and escapism. Not something I’m particularly proud of, but there it is. I react more appropriately at the social scale for which my brain evolved. I’m focussed and determined to minimize my father’s suffering in the last years of his life. I can only hope that someone will do that for me when the time comes. The essence of our responsibility as human beings is to help one another navigate this crazy existence we’ve been thrust into without consent. Being human is weird as fuck. Not very eloquent, but sometimes a statement like that just seems to capture the feeling of the thing. The heat has come on again, regulated automatically by a thermostat of coziness – a cozistat if you will. Set to “Snug as a Bug.” That means that I’m comfortably wrapped in my privilege with the news turned off. “Privilege” seems like something I don’t deserve. But coziness should be a human right, not a privilege.