Life is, in a word, ridiculous.  I will never understand how people can go through life with complete faith in one thing, when things happen daily that cause me to question everything I think I know!  Sometimes I feel like there has to be a loving God looking out for us, but other times I feel like however we got here, we’re on our own now.  It is hard to reconcile the evidence when it is so contradictory.  On the one hand, you have man’s capacity for love and intimate relationships, free will and knowledge, growth and ability to change, acts of anonymous kindness and global goodwill that bring tears to your eyes.  On the other, you have endless examples of man’s willingness to destroy, the greed and pettiness and judgment and fear that seems to drive us so often, the starving and the desperate left to die without aid from the mega-rich, hoarding their millions away without a thought towards those less fortunate…

There are earthquakes and mudslides and hurricanes and fires and tornadoes and tsunamis and everything that tells us nature is against us, it’s a battle for supremacy or the act of an angry creator wiping out his disappointing creation....And yet you also have rainbows and sunsets, the water cycle in its simple brilliance, the beauty of the oceans and the mountains and the forests, the changing seasons, and how everything seems to be interrelated somehow.  All of this beauty totally at odds with all of the ugliness - is it meant to be a balance?  Sometimes I think so.

But then there's the more hurtful proofs, the things that happen to us in our own lives.  Weeks like this, when the hits just keep on coming and it seems that everywhere I turn there is another example of how absolutely horrible life can be, it is so easy to see the bad and it feels almost impossible to see any of the good.  A friend asked me to tell her something good that happened to me the other day, and for the longest time I couldn't think of anything.  Not even one small thing, and it's not that absolutely nothing positive had happened, it was just that my perspective had been so focused on the bad that I couldn't recognize anything else.  I know I've had no shortage of times like this, and in these moments there's no amount of rainbows or sunsets or shooting stars or unicorns that could make me feel that the good outweighs the bad or even that somehow it balances out.  In these moments I'm convinced that things are hopeless.  But somehow, every time, I find myself having hope.  Maybe that's just life.  And like I said, life is ridiculous.