Often we feel we're too busy to give proper attention to the world's needs, to the anguish of those in trouble, to the many urgent social and environmental crises, or the collective problem-solving that seems necessary to get things in shape. So many problems, so little time.
Our days are full of our own concerns: managing the delicate balance of competing needs, taking care of work and others and health and money and leisure and friends and tidying the house every now and then too.
In recent weeks I find I have to turn the news off when it gets too detailed about other people’s suffering. I allow myself that reprieve, but still the knowledge that people are dying can wake me in the middle of the night.
Naturally, this burden of guilt and impotence adds itself to all the other pressures on us and increases our level of stress (just like everything else).
Those who are lucky are able to spare a bit of money or time to helping those in need. If you're even luckier, your career is going swimmingly and you can afford to catch breath once in a while and peek outside of your own rabbit hole.
But what if we did not need to separate those two domains? What if - by attending to our own worlds - we were attending to the greater world out there as well?
The Taoists held to a beautiful notion: the idea was that a human's primary work was to create order in their inner world, secondly in their primary partnership or family, and only then in the greater kingdom surrounding them.
The belief was that by addressing one’s own inner harmony a person was beneficially influencing everyone and everything around them.
Not only is there a positive ripple/multiplier effect, but in some mysterious, quantum way the world echoes 'in macro' the arrangement of one’s own inner life. By clearing your mental and emotional sock drawer, you are helping to clean up the burden of confusion and chaos out there too.
In this view of things, whatever job you have, you are a leader - of the world, no less.
It may be hard to give this notion credence, but it's an idea that permeates all mystical traditions - those rich veins of cosmic ‘matrix wisdom’ that thread themselves like underwater streams beneath the mainstream religions.
"As above, so below" goes the old Hermetic / alchemical / Elizabethan tradition.
Meanwhile, there's no question that the supply of balanced, calm and dynamic humans in this world is not exactly exceeding demand right now. So, like Pascal's Wager, you may as well give it a go.
If you're struggling to feel at peace with the state of the planet right now, you can make it your business first to attend to your inner world, reassured by the possibility that - indirectly - you may be helping everyone else along the way.
This is not to deny or shortcut the imaginative compassion we owe others who are worse off than us (so many), but it may add a little bit of agency and optimism.
It’s a long game, this world.