Thus harried, I am afraid of the damage I may be doing to myself (the typical Type-A personality). Yet my goal of a more tranquil and organized existence recedes farther away as each new dawn rises. Outwardly, I try to seem positive. Inwardly, I mope and grumble, brood and sulk. My brain feels dulled. "Never lose a holy curiosity," Einstein cautioned. But, petulantly ignoring him, I lose it.

SOON, HOWEVER, I AM ALSO BORED stiff by my own crapehanging. Despair, I believe, is a pretty self-indulgent affectation, the hand-maiden of self-pity, and a feeling to be scorned. Yet there it is, lodged in my bones, big as life.

How, with all the freedom bequeathed me, did I suddenly wind up in such a dither?

Finally, I collapse. Gloom breaks down the ramparts, rushes in, takes over. The pessimistic werewolf inside me sprouts long hair and howls at the moon. And the surrounding world, viewed by my lopsided eyeballs, becomes a grotesque parody of itself. Focusing primarily on negative events, I cannot escape a morbid awareness of the slaughterhouse. The cynic in me grows bold. In fact, almost gleefully I wallow in facts and figures that forecast nothing but doom.

For example, everywhere I turn I learn that the greenhouse effect is on. The North Pole is melting. Warmed by a polluted atmosphere, the eastern half of Antarctica could break off and drop into the briney deep. This would raise oceans by two hundred feet, placing the eastern US. shoreline in western Pennsylvania! And scientists proclaim that although the earth has been around for 4 6 billion years, it may take only fifty more years to kill it! Finally, it looks like curtains this time. Might as well eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow looks impossible. If carbon monoxide don't get us, Dr. Strangelove will turn the trick. And what is the meaning of a single life (my life) against the negative odds cast by humanity's vast indifference toward its own survival?

Yet always in the past, at some point in my gloom and doomsaying, a miracle was triggered in me. And just as I began to feel that life's brutal riddles were too difficult for solving, I would realize (once again) what I have always known: that the only worthwhile struggle on earth is the attempt to solve those riddles.

I have never understood why some mysterious cell has triggered in me a need not to collapse entirely and give up. I only know that I am always eternally grateful for the reprieve. No doubt we owe our survival as a species to those magic impulses in all of us.

"To affirm life is to deepen, to make more inward, and to exalt the will to live," said Albert Schweitzer. And somehow, at the depth of my personal despair, that epigram, and a dozen others like it, warm their way into my head and cannot be ignored.

With that (it never fails!) I have sudden powerful urges to change my negative habits. From out of the sticky darkness hurtle lusts to grow whole again. In almost beatific panic I realize that my role should be to soar with angels, sing praises, be arrogant like Nicaragua. And heal my whining self in order to function with hope instead of with all that banal wretchedness.

Text from the book "On The Mesa" by John Nichols, Copyright © John Nichols.
Reprinted with special permission from John Nichols - All Rights Reserved.
Photography © Peter Staats - All Rights Reserved.