At the daily-daily level – I’m assuming here that neither you nor I are presently locked inside a Turkish jail or floundering in a sinking ship on the Mediterranean, or otherwise embroiled in catastrophic events. I’m further assuming your heart’s in the right place, as they say. Meaning you care about what happens to other people, animals, the planet and so on. Injustice? No. Peace and harmony? Yes.

OK. Daily-daily wise, how does this play out, given that the whole world out there doesn’t agree with you. In fact, even some squirmy segments of your own psyche may hold different views. In their own unpleasant ways, their violence may be just as disquieting as some of the ugly stuff “out there”. Whereto now, my little chickadee?

In my case:

– exploring teaching aids for kids who don’t equate schooling with The Great Redemptive Leap.

– balancing expectations and hard-nosed realities – my own and those of people who came to this land with outsized dreams that won’t come true. Or, at least, those pieces of the dreams that will survive the hard knocks won’t look anything like what they appeared to be when they shimmered on the horizon.

-keeping the sense of humor part of the kit close at hand. Right next to the anger. They are allies, believe it or not. Or can be.

-writing for sanity’s sake.

That’s about it for now. On to the daily-daily stuff.