Three Good Things - Jeff Suwak

Here's the latest article by North Star author Jeff Suwak in today's edition of The Prague Revue.

Know that joy is rarer, more difficult, and more beautiful than sadness. Once you make this all-important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.                                                                                       –Andre Gide

   Writing in the modern age is a strange and often sleazy affair. So many voices are out there vying for attention that writers feel compelled to say outrageous, angry, and controversial things, things that provoke political disagreement, things that lower other people’s dignity in the name of comedy.  The masses’ appetite for all of those things is apparently endless, and the writers who get the most eyes are usually those that can find ways to provoke shock, enrage, and disgust.

   But, here’s the deal: I was just notified that I have a deadline to finish an article tonight, and I haven’t even started it, yet. What this means is that there is no time for bullshit. There’s no time for me to find snarky things to say about subjects that I don’t really care about. There’s no way for me to find a way to provoke a political witch hunt. All I’ve got time to do is to shoot the straight truth about what’s on my mind, and I’ve got some heavy stuff on my mind, tonight, my friends.

   The straight truth on this blustery Pacific-Northwestern night of the soul is that I’m in the midst of one of the lowest, dog-shit-eating stretches of my life. Nothing in particular has happened. I don’t know exactly what the problem is. It’s just been one of those stretches of days where I feel miserable, talentless, and unloved. I’m just tired. Really, really tired.
   Thing is, when you get stuck in these pessimistic ruts, you get tunnel vision. All that you can see is the misery of the world. The negativity builds and builds upon itself, and then you step into the internet and become dog-piled with all the triviality and superficiality and selfishness of the world.

   The thing is, there’s just so much nastiness out there that I just don’t want to add to it tonight. I can’t change the world. The one thing that I can do is to choose between spreading more negativity or adding some sort of positivity. This might seem insignificant. It might seem melodramatic. But, tonight, it doesn’t feel like any of those things to me.

For the rest of the article, please visit The Prague Revue here: Like, share, or comment on the article and let Mr. Suwak know what you thought of his article.