...with hope & confidence

The world is a scary place. Or maybe, some people make this world a scary place.

Like a lot of people, I watched the news with considerable dismay yesterday - first a bombing in Oslo, then a shooting at a youth camp.

Honestly, I don't care about the politics, opinions, motives, whatever of the individuals involved. If I were God, right now, I'd be saying, "I don't CARE who started it. I just want it to STOP NOW." (Oddly, in my mind, God sometimes sounds rather like an irritated mother.)

I think I said something this morning on Twitter about how I wished everyone would just shut up for a while. And how if I didn't hate camping - and if it weren't deadly hot here - I'd be strapping on my backpack and picking up my tent and running off to the forest for a few days to be away from people.

But then, as I was sitting at my microscope working, a thought hit me: "You should knit a scarf for the Red Scarf Project." Because I tend to believe that every loving act - even if it's just an anonymous one - adds to the balance of love in the universe, and that somehow, maybe, there will be enough kind and loving acts to somehow balance the hateful ones. (There's an old Jewish saying I read once, which I cannot find a text of online (which I find maddening: I can find just about anything else). It goes something like, "For every small act of kindness, God says, 'For this, I do not destroy the world.'")

I had to run some errands (and I also bribed myself with the promise of a trip to the bookstore if I finished the two samples I needed to finish). I also ran to the Hobby Lobby where I found, as if it were just waiting for me, three skeins of bright-red (they call it "Geranium") Bamboo Ewe on clearance. So it came home with me, and I cast on for the Toasty Twisty Scarf, because I was envisioning some kind of mock-cable pattern. (This is a pattern that will work for either a man or a woman.)

It soothes me considerably to be working on it. I'm going to see how much I can get done tonight and tomorrow, will probably post a picture of the progress Monday.

I do this not out of a purely altruistic feeling; it's also something that keeps me from totally flipping out, from writing off the human race, from deciding people are irredeemably bad, because I think about the college student (whom I will never know) that will receive this scarf and think, maybe, hopefully, they will turn out to be someone who does good in the world.

And also, I don't know, as I said I tend to believe that every loving act adds to the balance of love in the world. I NEED to believe that; if I didn't I think I'd be a much unhappier and more cynical person. And sometimes I need to very concretely remind myself of this fact.

I have until December to complete the scarf; December 1 is, I believe, the first day you send them in. It may even become my carry-it-around project this fall, so as I sit at the campus nurse's office or other places, if people ask me about what I'm knitting, I can explain to them...

I can't do much in this world, but I can do SOMETHING.