Possibly one or two followers noticed my vacation from 4 x per week blog posting in the last few months. There were good reasons—several of them. The flow was interrupted by out-of-town trips in October, November, and December (Austin, Louisville, and The Holiday Rust Belt Tour). Then there was the election, about which, what can one say that’s actually useful and, preferably, healing (see below)? Then the Holidays, and we celebrate most of them, plus our wedding anniversary. The first six weeks of the year are busy with birthdays, and, next thing I knew, here it is, the week of February 10.

Or maybe I was in shock that in mid-October I finally got my stove fixed, which had been out of commission for one year, five months, and ten days, an enervating experience of itself. During that time, I learned a lot about my grocery store’s prepared foods counter. Interesting. But now I have to cook again! I did managed to send out my quarterly newsletter, full of good reading and watching tips and my writing news. Are you a subscriber? Sign up here and receive three award-winning short stories.

At least during those months, an awful lot of reading got done. In its excellent November 18 issue, The New Yorker compiled essays “reckoning with Donald Trump’s return to power” written by a slew of authors tackling various issues. Most helpful to me, personally, was the piece by Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo, George Saunders, titled “Concerning the Underlying Disease.” So apt, because the schisms in our national psyche did not suddenly manifest on November 5.

The essay proposes various thought experiments on  circumstances in which we do (or could) mostly get along with people of differing views (Chiefs versus Eagles, for example). People today receive a Niagara of information that helps shape those views, but it’s “information of a peculiar sort, information that is powerful, and has been constructed far away, by people with agendas.” This information is delivered invisibly, in a way to stoke feelings of belonging; it’s addictive (doomscrolling); it’s overwhelming. It’s too much.

He asks whether it’s possible that these “heavily agenda-laced ideas from afar,” as he calls them, have such power within us that we mistake them for our own ideas, that they’ve accumulated exaggerated importance in our lives? This importance may be disproportionate to the issue’s actual effect on us and irrespective of whether we can do anything about them. We’ve come to feel, he believes, responsible for too much. It’s paralyzing.

For the sake of my own mental health, I’ve decided to calibrate how much I do feel responsible for. And what that is, exactly. I can’t turn Gaza into the Riviera (even if I wanted to). I can’t reunite immigrant families separated from their children (even though I would want to). I can’t do any of the hundred things I can think of that actually make more sense to me than what the politicians are either doing or not doing. What I can do is take a step back from other people’s agendas and concentrate on simply being kind. To myself, to you, to strangers. In the long run, living by example may have some effect. That isn’t to abandon all responsibility. It’s just to assess it better. To care about the people affected, not the affecters (a word?). And to do what I actually can, however large or small.