I went on a lunch date with my bride Saturday. We didn’t talk politics, we talked about new dinner plates and the house and things like that. Sometimes the present is both beautiful and awful, and the only thing that determines which wins the moment is what we choose to focus on.

There are plenty of reasons to feel down about the state of the world. There are plenty of reasons to feel joyful. As reasonable people, it’s possible to feel both at the same time. But we ought to be asking ourselves, which carry the day? A poem by Charles Bukowski, formatted in that Charles Bukowski way, comes to mind:

some people
grind away
making their
unhappiness
the ultimate
factor
of their
existence
until
finally
they are
just
automatically
unhappy,
their
suspicious
upset
snarling
selves
gringing

on
and
at
and
for
and
through

their only
relief
being

to meet
another
unhappy
person

or
to
create
one.
— Charles Bukowski, downers

When we get so distracted by the state of things, we sometimes forget to do the joyful things that make living an event worthy of our time. We can create a wake of misery behind us, or we can leave a ripple of joy. We should ask, just how do we want to be remembered? But let’s get right to the heart of the matter: just how do we want to move through this one go at life?