This is a general strategy. There is a more specific one that applies to many other issues and our general situation. It has to do with dealing with fear, despair and the sense of futility.

One reason we feel so vulnerable is inherent in our “either/or” way of thinking, an essential element in the 5,000 year history of what we call civilization. It may come as quite a shock to us that so-called primitive humans as far back as the Pleistocene had a more complex response to their reality.

For example, as they felt very close to animals, consciously learned from them, and considered them the embodiment of essential spirits. Yet they hunted and killed them. Scholars of the period such as Paul Shepard believe this deeply troubled them, but they developed a more complex way of seeing reality, which to our thinking would be paradoxical, though to theirs was a kind of natural spirituality.

Dealing with contradictions in our own lives has been a challenge for a long time, and going on living when great catastrophe can strike at any time is a challenge of our time.

In his novel, The Time Machine, H.G. Wells created a time Traveller who sees humanity as we know it end in the future, and he sees the earth eventually become lifeless. How can anyone avoid despair with such knowledge?

“I grieved to think how brief the dream of the human intellect had been," the Traveller recalled. " It had committed suicide." In an epilogue, the Traveller’s best friend acknowledges that the Traveller "thought but cheerlessly of the Advancement of Mankind and saw in the growing pile of civilization only a foolish heaping that must inevitably fall back upon and destroy its makers in the end."

The friend’s conclusion is a single sentence that also sums up Wells’ lifelong faith: “If that is so, it remains for us to live as though it were not so."

This is not acceptance of evil in our time, or complacency or denial, but acceptance of the rightness of our struggles and our lives regardless of the ultimate outcome. It’s summarized also in a quote from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who mentions Wells several time in his first novel.

"…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

That’s the part of his statement most often quoted, usually with reference to Keats’ theory of ‘negative capability.” But Fitzgerald went on, in a more Wellsian vein, and in a way that speaks most directly to us today:

“One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise."