How do we solve everything?

By everything, I mean everything. The pandemic, the economy, healthcare, education, overpopulation, elections, infrastructure, homelessness, climate change, joblessness, hunger, and disease in all its forms. All those seemingly big and abstract problems that are actually not so big and abstract. That seem to manage to fit within a brain just fine.

These problems (in their many and varied permutations) are keeping me from sleeping at night. They keep racing around my mind, and they refuse to stop.

They are everything.

When faced with a seemingly insurmountable problem, my first instinct is to retreat. Not from the problem, but into myself. I think. I consider. I outline. Finally, I act.

I. I. I. I.

I is not enough this time. The question is not and cannot be how do you or I solve everything. That’s untenable, despite what my brain would have me believe. Thinking about these problems in that way is what’s keeping me up at night. One brain simply cannot comprehend, much less solve everything by itself.

The question is and has to be how do we solve everything. You and me, them and us, together. Because we’re all we’ve got.

We will solve everything by thinking bigger and larger than ourselves. We will solve it by becoming more and better than we are now, both individually and as a society. By caring for each other and listening to each other and lifting each other up. By living, defiant in the face of all this but also responsible to ourselves and each other. We will live.

Because as long as we live, there is hope.

And if we hope, there is tomorrow.

And if tomorrow, then forever.