Facile and cliché

Can't sleep. The past few nights the heat has made it difficult but tonight it was something different. Something about transience. Our temporary nature, our shifting desires and responsibilities (i.e. rethinking the trip), our profound and devastating effect on our hitherto intransient terra firma, what to do with our lives -- I don't know. These are the morose garden-path meanderings of self-important adolescents and antsy midlifers, so I don't feel entitled, but it's nighttime and it's easy. Something floats up in my memory; something about how it's easy to be hard-boiled in the daytime, but at night it is another thing. I haven't been given to bouts of melancholic uncertainty since my indescribably indulgent teenage years, so what's going on?

Just finished a book called Chasing The Sea. Describing the author as "gifted" would be trite but appropriate. A compelling and very entertaining read but disturbing, and that's why it's essential. And that's why it's got me up and writing when I should be sleeping. Don't care about Uzbekistan? Couldn't find it on a map to save your life? Doesn't matter. I'll be returning my copy to the Richmond Public Library soon. Go get it. With a very familiar, drinking-buddy kind of presentation, without you knowing it it'll get you thinking about how unwittingly comfy your life is, relative to so many countless others. And there isn't one of us who doesn't desperately need perspective these days.

I think it's imperative that every one of us do one great thing in our lifetime, one thing that benefits someone other than ourselves, on a massive and lasting scale. That sounds so incredibly facile and cliché I want to punch myself in the face, but I think what's keeping me up is I'm so terrified that we won't do it, that we won't even try. We get so caught up in our overresourced, underhappy suburban lives that, even if we recognize and rail against the world's evils (and there's a lot of them), we'll never get up the gumption to effect any positive change. I'm not talking about semi-annual peace marches or wearing a tacky tie to work for the United Way; I'm talking about the kind of singular, good deed that my small, insomniac brain can't even begin to fathom right now.

Anyway, if you read this post, think about what we can do, you and I, as the sliver of the world's population that possesses the financial backing and personal liberty (and therefore choice) prerequisite to even accessing this blog. I'm looking for any good ideas. I've got my own but I need time to think them through. In the meantime, I know it'll be easier to feel better about this in the daytime, so I'm going to try and get some sleep.