Sobriety & the Knowable

I deleted several posts I was dissatisfied with. The reason were triteness, lack of circumspection, and reckless specificity.

Sobriety (in the most general sense of the word) and circumspection are good.

In my last post (also deleted), I made mention of a previous employer being charged with a grave crime. I used the phrase, "old boss", which is the kind of simpler English I'm accustomed to using with non-native speakers here (they in turn use a simpler version of the local language when speaking with me). The person is the president of a company I worked for about eight years ago. She wasn't my immediate supervisor, but we did meet two or three times in the course of work, and she and we employees were in frequent communication through the intermediary of our immediate supervisor. I haven't talked to her since then, and I don't think she particularly liked me, but I'm sure she still remembers who I am. 

I was very sorry to hear this news. 

A few months ago, a woman whose son was arrested for drug possession in the United States asked me what to do. Not what to do legally, what to do, in life, as a response to these circumstances, to make them better.

I had never thought about it before and I groped around for something to say. I may have said at first, "I don't know"--because that was the honest truth.  But as I mulled it over, and we kept talking, I came to the conclusion that in situations like this, not knowing is actually the heart of the matter. You can only do what's knowable, and there's almost never one determinable grand sweeping gesture within your control that will make everything okay. It seems obvious in the saying, in a blog post. It's not so obvious to the person in the center of the situation who feels--sometimes correctly--that their whole fate may hinge on the outcome of current circumstances.

There are, however, a multitude of knowable small things that can be done. You sort these by priority, and then you plod through them as diligently as you can, on the understanding that they may add up to the big result you hope for, but always bearing in mind the possibility--even the likelihood--that it may not come to pass. You don't focus on assigning blame. That may assuage the desire to curse the malefactors which brought the present circumstances to pass, but the past is outside one's control, and focusing on it is unproductive, except perhaps insofar as it may illustrate the consequences of poor choices, and may be salutary for avoiding their repetition in the future.