There are countless individuals who make it a point to be current with news, all news worthy of attention, whether local, national or global. And nor do those people who with deliberation take steps to avoid directly confronting the news because of its depressing effect on their thoughts, escape those stories recounting conflicts of epic proportions -- and the barbaric actions of people whose sense of human dignity is too degraded to be rescued -- manage to void their minds of the lives lost and the atrocities inflicted by people loyal to an inhumane ideology that demands deadly violence as its due.

It is, in short, difficult to maintain an emotional equilibrium. To be informed is to have knowledge of the crude and cruel actions taking place on a daily basis that have their genesis in ethnic, tribal, clan, sectarian, ideological and religious confrontations between people of opposing groups. Humanity fails, time after time, to overcome its most base instincts meant to equip the human animal for survival in a hostile world, and which modern humanity has been incapable of, and unwilling to surmount by reason and a compulsion to compassion for others.

There are emotional escape valves to rescue people from the deep dudgeon of despair; that is, those who are not directly affected by the never-ending maelstrom of carnage afflicting so many regions of the world. There is, of course, the bonds that people forge between one another in more civilized areas of the world, further removed in time and place from the more primitive, tribal impulses that motivate far too many to view others as hostile to their own advancement and therefore, requiring to be despised, hated and violated.

There is the comfort of family and close friends for those who are fortunate enough to be able to rely on those age-old bonds of trust and togetherness. And there is also the calming effect of assurance that nature itself is capable of arousing in all of us, recalling a time in the past when humankind was more reliant on nature to provide the basic requirements of human existence before humans learned how to exploit, manipulate and subvert the natural world to reflect  what humanity intended to wring from it.

Living in a part of the world where, if terrorism intrudes, it does so minimally, and the prevailing institutional law and order steps in to quell violence and protect society from its effects, there is that escape valve; we can consider ourselves fortunate and we can entertain our options to becalm our spirits by taking full advantage of the bucolic memories of an earlier time, and the graciousness of the natural world proffering peace and tranquility as a balm in a world where civilization appears far too often on the verge of collapse.