Tetris, The Anthropocene, and Gratitude

Tonight I met up with one of my most favorite people on earth.  One of those people that just gets me.

Sometimes we cook a meal for families that could use a little comfort food at our local Ronald McDonald House.  The joy of: cooking, talking, eating, and helping are all great distractions even though deep down you know you are there because something bad is happening.  That moment came tonight scrawled in red Expo marker on the family update whiteboard.  Baby X has open heart surgery scheduled for tomorrow. 

I let that sit on my brain as I loaded up the car for the ride home and cued my recent binge podcast, The Anthropocene Review by John Green.  An episode about Tetris!  Another welcome distraction.  But, that clever John Green obviously won't write an upfront piece about my favorite game ever, he has to hide something epiphanous.

Of course, you should just go listen to the episode here, but this was the part that gutted me:

I don’t know if I’m alone in this regard, but I have this omnipresent pain inside me, a constant and gnawing pain that I’m always trying to distract myself from feeling. This pain is generally a kind of minor background anguish that only occasionally gets bad enough to take over my life, but it’s also never not there. It is hard for me to describe the pain without resorting to figurative language, but I think it is the pain of meaninglessness, the fear that my vast interior life will die with me and that my brief miraculous flicker of consciousness will not have been for anything. For me at least, there is a terrifying depravity to meaninglessness, because it calls into question not only why I write and read and garden and eat and love and everything else, but also whether I should even bother, which is a line of thinking I genuinely cannot afford to indulge. Of course, such pain must be confronted and dealt with, carefully considered and battled against. There are times for deep engagement with the overwhelming questions. But there are also times for pure and magnificently empty distraction.

Enter Tetris, which is incredibly effective at distracting me from that way-down pain. And I think effective distractions are a gift to the world, because when that background pain overwhelms me, I can't do the work of finding and building meaning in my life.

I love so many things about this short excerpt.  Asking the question, "Should I even bother?"  I've done it.  You've done it.  I can't imagine a being who hasn't.  

After tonight, the question didn't seem so unanswerable.  Of course I should bother when a mother may lose her child tomorrow.   Effective distractions truly are a gift to the world.