As I’ve mentioned before, I have been dealing with different forms of loss recently.

I have had some personal transitions that feel like a loss. I lost my job with no advance notice (I have since found another). Currently, wildfires are sweeping my region. Earlier in the week, fires ravaged one of my favorite towns, a place that I have come to see as a refuge. Yesterday, fires near my office prompted an office closure. Today, I am on alert that high winds could pick up an ember and start a fire close to my home.

With all of that, however, I find this question difficult to answer because I still have so much to lose. Both of my parents are still alive and available for me. My partner brings me so much joy and comfort, as does our pet cat. I have a safe (more or less), comfortable place to live. I have a wonderful network of friends

I also have tremendous freedom to do what I want when I want. I have the ability to make people laugh, which I treasure so much. I also have the opportunity to perform and create.

How could I pick one thing I would miss the most? I have so much but can still feel empty. I saw a quote from A.A. Milne the other day, “How lucky I am to have something that makes saying goodbye so hard.”

This is a very intriguing question for me. I try to be as self-reflective as possible, though I am sure that I have blindspots and defense mechanisms, and I genuinely do not think that I am the kind who waits for very much.

I have a history of taking on changes and challenges readily. Almost 10 years ago, I and moved across the country without a job or even particularly strong prospects. I have had about 20 jobs in fewer than 15 years. (Most of those moves were not voluntary. I worked for a while in a volatile industry and have experienced every kind of lay-off you can imagine–downsizing during a recession, selling a company, change of leadership.) At the beginning of the year, I bought a house–the first one my partner and I considered. We went from browsing to starting escrow in about a week. I do volunteer work to develop my community and take classes to learn new skills.

Lately, however, I have felt that I am waiting to do something. I have felt moody, apprehensive, anxious, guilty… I can’t quite put my finger on it. I still have some major decisions to make in my personal life, nothing terribly unique, but they are unique for me.Perhaps I am waiting for guidance, confirmation, direct, something to point me in the direction I want to go.

I have been thinking a lot lately about the Nietzsche quote, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”I feel like I have plenty of “how”–shelter, sustenance, health–but not much “why,” which is why gratitude can be difficult at times.The other day, I wrote an ode to coffee, and it made me think about the splendor of food. It is–perhaps geniusly–both a how and why. Without food, we perish, but our …I have been thinking a lot lately about the Nietzsche quote, “He who has a why to live for can bear almost any how.”I feel lately like I have plenty of “how”–shelter, sustenance, health–but not much “why,” which is why gratitude can be difficult at times.The other day, I wrote an ode to coffee, and it made me think about the splendor of food. It is–perhaps geniusly–both a how and why. Without food, we perish, but our bodies take pleasure in it. It’s a perfect virtuous circle. We need to do this thing to live, but we also want to do it.So I will appreciate the splendor of all food, the rich flavors, the depth and complexity, and the work that is done so that it is available to me.

I had a conversation with my partner about this recently because I have always taken issue with asking people how they are without expecting a genuine answer. Recently, I’ve been struggling with severe moodiness, and I have taken to telling people how I actually feel when they ask. Sometimes I preface that by asking if they genuinely want to know or were just being polite. Regardless, it helps me tremendously. Conversations are much richer, and just sharing lightens my own emotional burden.

I recently had a very long, helpful conversation with a friend that started because he emailed me and asked how I was.

Last year, I regularly took a bus with a Sikh driver. He had made conversation with me a few times when I got on. I responded then sat down because I didn’t really know what else to say to him. Then several hate crimes targeting Muslims (and sometimes Sikhs, who are confused for Muslims) disturbed me, including an unprovoked attack in my city on a Sikh bus driver.

I decided to begin talking to my driver everyday, just to show that I meant no harm. I learned a lot about him. He had owned a home but had to sell. He had two children, and his daughter was on a swim team. I had been on my college’s swim team, so I was able to talk about that. He had stopped eating meat recently, and I have been vegan for several years. He recommended a really good restaurant in the area.

Eventually, I got to know other people on the bus too.

In my experience, listening and sharing brings solace. When my mood is at its lowest point, I feel isolation, loneliness and scarcity. Inviting other people in, getting to know them, makes me feel full.

The need to be right was deeply, deeply ingrained in my by my mother. Years ago, I was talking to her about a conflict with her sister, and my mother said that she couldn’t understand why her sister was acting the way she was. I suggested that my mother try taking her sister’s perspective, and she said, “Why would I want to be wrong?”

Recently, I was discussing vegetarianism with my mother. I haven’t eaten meat in several years, and she told me that being vegetarian is too difficult. I told her that I didn’t understand how she–somebody who has never tried to stop eating meat–could tell me–who has not eaten meat for many years–how difficult it is to do. She escalated the conversation to an argument over this point, determined to stand by her reasoning.

I have worked for many years to eliminate this need in myself and have found that it has opened me up to new people and new experiences. Today, however, I noticed a homeless person on the bus–his clothes dirty and tattered, his skin crusted and flaky, his only possessions strung together tightly enough to carry. I was irritated by his presence because he was blocking the aisle, and his odor pervaded the bus.

I was responding to him–another person simply trying to get around town–as an intrusion on my comfort, as though my use of the space was right and his wrong, his mere presence wrong. I realized that this response came from a place of defensiveness, of needing to justify myself, to be right and tried looking at him again with new eyes. What I felt was empathy, not sympathy or condescension, but the feeling that we are all in this together, trying to make sense of an arbitrary set of circumstances largely beyond our control.

Perhaps that is what I will find by relinquishing my own egotistical defense mechanisms.

I have struggled with this question lately. For years, I believed in counting my blessings, trying not to take anything for granted. Recently, I have found that this led me to a sort of scarcity thinking, however. In effect, saying, “I should be glad to have food because not everybody does,” is a form of comparison, taking pleasure in having something that others do not, defining yourself by what you have or don’t have. I worried that someday I would not have these basic necessities and felt guilty that–largely through the luck of my circumstances–I had something essential that others lack.

Thinking about what I am truly grateful for, the first thing that comes to mind is coffee (I am drinking some right now). I absolutely love the taste of coffee, particularly lighter roasts with savory flavors. With about 20 exceptions, I suspect I have had at least one cup of coffee everyday of my adult life. People have been drinking coffee for centuries. It is available at gas stations. It seems to be the one thing that every office provides for employees. People drink it when they feel terrible in the hopes that it will revive them.

As pervasive and degraded as it is, I am truly grateful for coffee.

My parents still live in the house where I grew up. This has its comforts, though they are largely superficial. In the decades that my parents have owned the property, it has increased in value tremendously, and I know that–if worse ever comes to worse–I have a safe haven to which I can return for shelter. But I don’t know that I have felt at home there in many years, if I ever did.

I remember knowing as a teenager–and even as a child–that I belonged in a city. I rarely connected with the people around me in my hometown, and I always had the feeling that a place for me existed somewhere, just not there.

I have lived in London, New York City, and–for almost a decade now–Los Angeles. I have always felt at home in the city. I love the sense of endless exploration available to me. I came to Los Angeles for work and, at the time, would probably have gone wherever I could expect to find work. But I have come to love this place–its culture, its beauty, its people, and its vibrance.

Earlier this year, I decided to purchase a house. In order to find something in my price range, I needed to move to an area in Los Angeles that is developed as a suburb. It is further from the ocean, which I love possibly more than anything, and hotter. I cannot find a community or any cultural center, just row after row of isolated houses. Most importantly, when I step out of my door, I do not feel like I am stepping into an exciting world, free to explore.

Yesterday, I made some time to return to the city, ostensibly looking to buy a bed. The sky was overcast, and the air was chilly. I went from one secondhand store to another, rubbing elbows with collectors scouting vintage finds and working class parents buying their children winter jackets. I saw furniture, clothing, and books that were once a part of other people’s lives.

I am really struggling with place right now. I feel tethered to this house in which I’ve invested, worried that–as global warming increases–it will become uninhabitable. I know that I will need to address the distance between me and my parents and do not know what the solution to that will be. I have been laid off from work twice since 2015 and am just settling into a new job, now worried that I will need to relocate and find something new all over again.

But yesterday, for the first time in a long time, I felt at home, wandering the streets with no shelter at all.

Thank you. I don’t know the full scope of the damage. It is really an extraordinary experience because this massive destruction is taking place around me, but my exposure to it is limited. I have seen photos of the fires, but my experience of it is just some smoke in the air.

As I said, my office was closed in the middle of the week. When I returned, people were speaking about the fires and dealing with some of the ramifications, but we didn’t have a group processing or acknowledgment. It was like business as usual, which is so bizarre to me. The sun is back in the sky, businesses are open, and buses are running. It is both reassuring and disconcerting.

I was thinking about your response today. I have been active to varying degrees in–or at least aware of–electoral politics in the U.S. (where I live) most of my adult life.

The value of being civically engaged and aware has always been drilled into me, and for years I seemed to find a balance that worked for me personally at that time. Recently, I have begun to find myself worn out by the vitriol. I have also had personal issues that demanded more of my time, so I have stopped seeking out news coverage for the past few days.

Today I received some emails from different political organizations warning of very dangerous steps being taken by the opposition party that would hurt people financially. Now, this might very well be the case. Perhaps what these politicians are doing will negatively affect people’s finances. I am not an economist, so I can’t really say. I do know that nobody–even economists–can forecast the future with great accuracy.

I also know that all politicians rely on voters to keep their jobs. If a politician truly believed that their plan would genuinely hurt people financially, why would they advocate for it, knowing that they could be voted out of office?

I am aware of the myriad explanations commonly offered in response to this question (corporate interests, lobbyists, the media, etc.). But I am also aware that, if the U.S. presidential election or the Brexit vote have demonstrated anything, it’s that–in electoral politics–voters do still have power. So, taking a step back, these politicians could be just plain evil and actively trying to hurt people without concern for their own political interests, but that doesn’t seem likely to me. In all my experience, I have never met anybody I considered just plain evil like that.

The other alternatives are that they are doing what they believe is going to be advantageous for them and their constituents. Perhaps this is will not be beneficial for everybody–but I don’t know of too much that is.

So, returning to the emails I got, why did these organizations preach fire and brimstone, instead of saying, “The opposition party believes that it’s plan will be beneficial for them and their constituents, but we disagree based on this evidence”? If I had to take a guess (and I genuinely don’t like attributing motivation to others), I would say it’s because their jobs are to motivate me to vote a certain way, donate money to their cause, or take action on behalf of their agendas.

In the U.S., the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives have all changed hands in as many permutations as I think are possible in the 17 years I’ve been of voting age. So I have to believe that that will continue. It’s an industry that is built on this process, the same way that advertising is built on making people believe that purchasing a particular product will fill a need.

After the last election, my mother kept saying that she couldn’t understand how anybody voted for the other party’s presidential candidate. I asked if she believed that people truly were voting for the candidate or just down party lines, and she said that she assumed they were voting for the candidate and that candidate’s platform. So I asked my mother which parts of her party’s candidate’s platform and the only answer she could give was something vague about helping families.

I am reminded of a quote from Einstein that I heard paraphrased recently (which is to say that I will get it wrong), “Why count on the same level of reasoning that caused the problem to solve the problem?”

What’s funny is that it doesn’t feel like self-help at all, but it creates such an amazing sense of fulfillment and abundance.

For the past few years, I have done volunteer work tutoring high school students writing college admissions essays. I absolutely love doing it because I get to learn so much about these kids. Their experiences are different from mine at that age and largely what one might expect from people in their circumstances. One kid was in a drive-by shooting. One kid lived in an apartment with another family and only saw his mother once a week because she works nights and weekends.

Talking about these kids now, their lives sound devastating to me. But talking with them, it was just their lives. I wasn’t looking at them thinking how glad I was to have more financial and social resources than they did but glad that such a multitude of experiences can co-exist. I don’t know how else to express the feeling, but I genuinely do see the benefit of just getting out and interacting with people.

That reminds me of the line (attributed to Rumi but actually from a translation by Coleman Barks that I find to be divergent enough from the original text that I would credit him first):
“Out beyond ideas of right-doing and wrong-doing, there is a field, I will meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about.”

I have tuned myself out of a lot of media in the U.S. at the moment. That is not because I do not believe in being aware of the state of affairs but almost because of it. In many ways, I am more engaged now than ever–socializing, volunteering, taking classes, working on projects, traveling with my partner.

As devastating as the world might appear at the moment, I find abundance when I choose to engage with and be present in it.