A good friend called me yesterday to say he is so discouraged from reading the news every day, and from following the hate-filled presidential campaigns. How, he wondered does one stay grounded and hopeful in such a world? How, he asked, do I try and do it?

“What would Thomas Merton do?,” he asked. Thomas Merton had a deep faith in God, I said, and that sustained him, so I can’t speak for  him.  He was a monk, sometimes a hermit. When he chose, he withdrew from the world.

I think it is a matter of small things, done in small ways.

I said it is hard, it is always hard to deal with fear and hatred and angry, parts of the human condition. Human society has never existed without fear and hatred.

It seems we humans were built to experience fear and hatred, even as the better parts of us yearn for something better. The tenets of every major faith preach love and forgiveness, the ethos of real life often suggests something much harsher.

In the Kabbalah, God says that Love is the necessary ingredient for human happiness, and the purest expression of the soul, a Godly act in and of itself. Love, he says, is the point. But is is not simple to love, love seems to compete with fear and anger and resentment, and is often consumed by them.

I told my friend that I also, of course, get upset but what I see of the outside world, I am  no guru or saint. But I also see those things as a gift for me, an opportunity to define myself, to ask myself what I am about, who I want to be, how  I want to live?

I am not responsible for what politicians say or broken people do, I can’t save them or stop them, I wish I could. I can only be responsible for me, one day at a time. Every day, I am given the gift of being better, more self-aware, of exploring the true power of empathy, and listening, and of course, of love itself.

I love Maria. I love my daughter. I love the animals on the farm, my friends, my writing, my photography, my blog. I take a photo. I write a poem. I walk in the woods, herd sheep with the dogs, read a book I love, hug my wife or bring her flowers. I list the things I am lucky to have, and give thanks for the opportunity to live my life.

I cannot live in the minds and heads of other people, I can shine a light on my own. Love, I think, is the necessary ingredient for human happiness, compassion and empathy two more. If I cannot feel or express my love for life, then true human happiness will elude me, as it has eluded the hateful and the angry. They are, in every sense of the world, loveless, no matter how much they parade their children around in front of them.

I will not complain about the world I live in, or speak poorly of my life, or lament the days gone by, or ever speak of how the young are not as good as the young we were. Nostalgia is a trap, a tarpit of frustration and envy, a way of denying change and mortality.

Like fear and hatred, love and empathy are viral, they can easily be transmitted from one human being to another.

The souls of the angry are pale and trembling, they have no pure way to express themselves, they are imprisoned deep inside. Their gift to me is to not be them. Every day of my life.

That, I told my friend, is how I deal with the bad and angry news of the world.