The first time I was accused of being ideallistic was when I was in Jr High.  As a class exercise, I was engaged in a debate over the fate of trees.  I refused to cop to being ideallistic, because my entire point was that one could take their ideals and make them *practical* with just a wee bit of thought, flexibility, and ingenuity.

Yes... I was highly ideallistic.

Yesterday MDH (my dea husband) came home a wee bit cranky.  The news is always on at work, so he is force-steeped in it.  And everyone from the brand-new barely 18 recruit to the crusty guard folk has an opinion matched only in its extremity by their ferocity to shove it at everyone they meet.  Of course it is delivered with the full assumption that the receiver will a) agree fully and b) be grateful.  In the meantime he's watching the same people barely manage their jobs while talking about how their own life-management is going.  This they are non-chalant about.  But they know, by god, who Brad Pitt should be dating, how to evacuate an entire region of the united states... twice... what the tax rate, interest rate, and price of oil should be, the purpose of the UN and how it should be carried out, what version of what religion we should *all* be practicing, what type of court the supreme court should be, and of course, what to do in Iraq so that the entire place will be filled with daisies sometime in the next two months.  And they are pissed that the people actually in these positions are not as smart as they are.  And even more pissed at other americans who disagree with them.  Turn on the tv... more of the same.  Two minutes of news for every 28 of conjecture and opinion.  Internet? Blogs?  Rinse, lather, repeat.  Everyone just as sure they are right and everyone else is full of it.

Oddly enough, MDH and I came to the same conclusion yesterday.  ENOUGH already. He asked me if we were getting old and crotchety... I said maybe we were.  When I was young I was going to save the world.  But when I was young, I was... mentally incapacitated is a gently way of putting it. 

I still want to save the world.  But I've learned a few things.  Life is actually not that very dramatic.  It really isn't.  And I have a choice as to what I will do with the dramas I am presented.  And I have a life, right here, which I am presented with every day.  The decisions I am faced with on a daily basis include how I will balance my own health and well-being with the care of my family.  How I will treat the people around me.  And those decisions, when managed properly, do not depend on me getting everyone else to agree with my inherent rightness.  They are simple, daily, and quite enough to manage when one truly pays attention to them.  It seems to me this is the way things are set up intentionally.  Manage your own house, and the circle of effect widens and ripples out naturally.  Attempting to jump out and manage the ideas and decisions of others before you've even mastered your own is merely a lesson in futility and frustration.  So yes... I *do* want to save the world.  And I will do it by starting *here* with myself... mdh... my children... the people I meet every day.  Rather than distracting myself with dramas I find easy to point at with my righteousness, I will practice right here, right now, and trust that it is enough.  And if there is more for me to do, it will be shown to me. Because becoming as rabid as some of the folks I've met, can *not* be good for me, or mdh, or my children, or the people I meet... and I'd really rather spread a little positive than all that negative, stressed-out, foaming-at-the-mouth mess.  It just can't be good for us, ya know?