What do you do when you don’t know where you are?

I look about me, befogged. I’m in America, yes, in my room, surrounded by books – and friend Henry – my health intact: lucky by any measure, free to do as I please. Soon Jane will be up. We will talk, read, walk, watch a lecture over lunch, a pleasant movie during dinner. We may have chores or meetings scheduled. I will write, though I don’t know what yet. I begin and see where my words take me. Words must always be going somewhere; A must lead to B to C and so forth. That’s what’s happening now. I am pushing my pen to carry me somewhere new. My pen balks, grumpy: “I don’t want to.” “But you must,” I explain. “If I did not write, I would not know why I was. I’d grow sad, grim, start asking questions I know have no answers. Writing deludes me with a sense of purpose. Besides, it’s fun once you get started. And we don’t want to let our readers down. So get a move on, chop chop.”

Usually words spurt from me like mustard from a squeeze bottle or blood from a pricked vein.  Recently, though, I’ve had to kick and shove my words to get them going. This began after our catastrophic election. I found myself wondering, why bother? What use words in a world gone wrong?

That I know the answers to such questions does not preclude me from asking them. I write because I love to, it is what I do, I don’t know what else to do, if I didn’t write I’d spiral into a funk, blah-blah-blah. I feel like a parent coaxing surly junior onto the school bus. What a wearisome waste of breath – just go, can’t you! Trying to force the issue, though, might prove counterproductive. The infuriating little so-and-so must be persuaded!

What’s changed, I wonder, to make me so much less eager?

Writing, the sort I do, is amiable, not necessary. I’ve got no lesson to impart, product to pitch, thesis to prove. I’m shooting the breeze, beguiling the time, enabling myself – and you, I hope – to feel less alone. Until the election, I felt you and I were nudging our nation in the right direction, fostering sanity, bucking each other up.

Then whammo, we the people made the stupidest mistake imaginable, not a few of us but a majority. We elected as leader a person manifestly unfit – in intellect, judgment, competence, temperament, character – a proven evildoer – who’d wreak havoc with, perhaps destroy the civilized world. WTF! Writing – promoting sanity, decency, good will – suddenly felt like rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic. Why bother?

I believed humans better than this. I believed America worth fighting for. Then my balloon popped. To hell with trying to sweeten my world, humans were too far gone.

My nature tromps after crazy stars. “I am an idealist,” said the poet Carl Sandburg. “I don’t know where I’m going but I’m on my way.”

The star fell out of my sky. I didn’t know where I was.

My job now – yes, job – is to reglue that star to my sky, coax myself to board that school bus, remind myself why my life and ours are worth the effort. Illusion is the cure for disillusion. “That life is worth living is the most necessary of assumptions,” said Santayana, “and were it not assumed the most impossible of conclusions.”

I’m working at revving the old engine. Our daily strolls are my reason to be.