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.