On not feeling guilty when the sun shines

Today there is glorious sunshine here, although it is raining somewhere else. I don't feel guilty about this.

But I do feel guilty when I think of how lucky I am in general. I'm living in a peace zone. I have interesting employment in a fairly free and equable society. Myself and those I care for are in adequate health and we have access to medicine. Other people are living in terror, in poverty, in pain.

Why is that different from the sunshine? I didn't make the wars, oppose international equal rights or undermine anyone's healthcare system. But nevertheless it is different, because I could do something about the misfortune of others. I sign petitions and give money to charities, but I could take humanitarian aid to a war zone, I could devote more time campaigning for equality and justice. Lots of people risked their own health fighting Ebola, thank goodness. But I didn't. I carried on doing my marginally worthwhile day job and looking after my family. I went out with friends, enjoyed the sunshine, and fretted about not getting enough exercise or giving my son enough vegetables.

The stoics believed that you need to start with acceptance of how things are; that all wise action comes from calm consideration rather than emotional drive. But to the best of my knowledge they mostly talked about coming to terms with your own misfortunes, not those of others. Presumably one's own suffering was the greater challenge then. They didn't have a 24-hour news industry.

News may be the greatest challenge of modern life. As responsible citizens of the world we must inform ourselves, just as we take an interest in the welfare of friends and colleagues. What is the difference? A few miles? In the age of the internet? It feels like a duty to be aware of world news.

But we experience news events out of context, and out of scale. It feels local: we see faces, hear voices. It feels as if it's happening in our street, and in so far as we all are interconnected waves in the universe, it is. But the world, though connected, is large, and we are small, and finite.

School trip nerves cannot be adequately responded to in the context of someone else's hostage crisis. But the news comes in, so, lest all personal concerns be swamped by the international theatre of cruelty and disaster, many people respond by blunting their sense of connection to the distant events. How else to defend raising money to further improve your local school facilities, when there are so many schools with no facilities, and so many children with no school at all?

Is there a better way to survive modern like than by blunting our awareness of connection? Perhaps the answer is to actively honour our particle nature. We do have a focused location, however much we spread out from it around the edges. Cherish the world right beside you - wherever you go and whoever arrives - because you cannot cherish properly at long distance. And be grateful, not guilty, when any kind of sun shines on you, because it's not shining everywhere.

On being a wave and a particle

In order to understand how light behaves you sometimes have to think of it as a particle; sometimes it as a wave. We learn this at school, where they don't generally mention that the same is true of everything else in the world, not just light.

It's usual to think of ourselves as particles in a universe of particles. Particles eat other kinds of particles, wear particles, and tell, or don't tell things (particles of information) to other particles. This perspective sets up meaningful boundaries around various parts of the world and we can uncover real understandings by thinking this way. I'm a big fan of my smart phone, my hot and cold running water, and the fact that I'm here at all, which I owe to modern medicine.

But we are also waves in the stuff of the universe: local gestures of the space-time-mind through which other gestures - minerals, energy, other life - flow. Our actions provoke other actions and reactions and the interference patterns are so complex as to be unpredictable. Chemicals and microbes flow through us around the world too - we catch and pass on all manner of colds as well as ideas. Metabolites of the medicines we take pass through us into the water the whole city drinks. Sometimes we might, in time, have exactly the opposite effect to the one we intended.

We don't like the implicit loss of free will inherent in the wave perspective: we want to make choices, not just react and rebound against the rest of the universe. But the alternative can be even more depressing: as infinitesimal particles, we are futilely struggling like fallen flies in the meniscus of the world. It's a matter of scale: we can't change the world - it changes, and we might be part of that change.

The only answer is to let go of free will, and just do what we do. You love your children because you love them, not because you should. And all the laws and all the wars in the world haven't stopped people from doing cruel things.

Do we dare let go of both the responsibility and the blame. Could the world could survive an escape from conscious, intentional morality? Might it even be the saving of the world?

I  am a wave, continuous with the universe and participating in unpredictable developments in unexpected ways. But I'm also a particle and unless I get up to put the kettle on, or persuade someone else to, there will be no tea.