Often enough, we can find ourselves in a place, both completely recognizable and profoundly strange. Sometimes, we don’t even know we’ve been there until we’ve see sand from the desert on our pants and fragments from the Rain Forest in our boots. Or we see what image emerges in our camera and wonder how something could have played out in front of our eyes while we were paying attention to something. It’s like playing that ‘“nobody saw the gorilla on the basketball court because we were watching the game” kind of phenomena. This doesn’t only happen in our material world. It happens in our social and political world, as well. We wake up in the middle of the night in anguish because we suffered an unaccounted for moral injury earlier in the day. 
We often take ourselves to task for living these privileged lives and those points are all well taken. The ways of the world are crazy. There is no arc of justice that bends fast enough toward justice as we’d like it to be. There is no denying that there are forces bending the arc the other way, perhaps towards a world they see as just. It should be noted that our complex interconnected world yields great fortunes for some of us but it comes at a great cost not only to others but ourselves, as well, in the alienation, the existential threats, the complex nature of matters around us. Perhaps, those are all diseases of modernity but it seems more than that recently. Like the photo above, I seem to be underwater, somewhat adrift, in a world less of my making and certain less to my liking. The world swirling and our struggle to gain footing. Perhaps, in our complex rapidly-changing world, the longer we are alive, the more alienated we feel. Unless, we take the long view — that we are members of a long lineage of creatures on the world, stumbling along and making the best of our limited and limiting view of what’s around us.