Humanity's Reminder

Dark days get darker.  More shootings than days in the year gone by, more stereotypes, and the line between perception and paranoia diminishes to a slender thread.
The nation readies itself for the holiday season as anticipation gets tempered by the varieties of pain and suffering never before imagined.  We are all waiting for another large shoe to drop somewhere...nearby.

That a pall hangs over our planet is hardly news anymore.  And still we go to the well to find relief.  What do you do or where do you go for a reason to rise and do it all over again from day to day?
Best advice I ever got was to go to what you know will always be there and what you know to be true.  The variety of filters we all use to comprehend our eternal predicament makes anything possible.  I go to the Blues.  If nothing else, it brings a smile, or a tear.  The polarization of my emotions.  The reminder of my humanity.
We all need our escapes and there are an infinite amount of alternate universes from which to choose.  Maybe we could simply by a gift for someone or pay forward  few dollars we intended for something else.  Most likely, we don't even know what we intended a few dollars for, do we?
Somewhere, a tiny voice reminds us that January is almost upon us and a huge collective corner will be turned.  The color of the month will change.  So, if in this pitch we currently navigate, the reds are violet to burgundy, and the greens don't quite have the odor of fir or spruce, the light of another sun will glow over the mountain in that someday to come next year.
This is how we do it.  We savor what we know to be permanent or at least seems so, and force ourselves to remove our own agendas from our dealings with others and then stand (and sit) back and watch the river flow.