Remember when we were kids and quicksand was a frequently used trope in movies, TV, and cartoons?
It seemed to pop up somewhere every week, even in shows where it made no sense at all.
Then we grew up and realized quicksand isn’t all that common, Hollywood was just out of new ideas even back then. They just did a better job of polishing up whatever they recycled. At least most of the time.
These days, though, it feels like the quicksand is back, only it’s invisible now which makes it a lot harder to avoid and near impossible to get out of.
There’s a new travel warning from the State Department but it’s so broadly vague we have no idea what the danger is or where it is, or if it’s even real or just a made up pretext to justify whatever new assault on justice and liberty is about to be unleashed.
A food borne pathogen wreaks havoc across 31 states and we can’t find the source for weeks. Then we do, but when the bad press starts the agency we trust to keep our food safe makes a retraction and suddenly we are unsure again.
In the past we’d be frustrated and annoyed, but now we’re also suspicious.
And we still don’t know if we can have a salad in peace.
Every day we find out yet another once respected public figure is actually a predatory creep or bigot of some kind and we seem to no longer have a single untainted piece of media we can enjoy without being aware of some truly awful thing that went on behind the scenes.
We can’t even trust our own lyin’ eyes. Is that video of a bear cub real, or just a hallucination made of random pixels thrown together by a machine?
They say reality is subjective, but there have to be at least some solid places to anchor us or we risk losing our souls along with our minds.
People say turn to faith, but they can’t seem to agree on what to have faith in.
Turns out a lot of “true believers” don’t actually believe, they’re just using a twisted set of rules to justify hate and cruelty and now the political party that once impeached a president over a consensual blow job looks the other way while their own members prey on children.
How deeply held can a belief actually be if it only applies to how others should live and not to yourself?
And our empirical, objective science isn’t so objective after all because the experiments that define it are as biased as the all too human scientists who design and conduct them.
That one’s fixable at least, and kudos to those who are trying, but it’s still kind of a pain to be stuck in the middle while you wait for the errors to get corrected.
Sorry, but there are some things that “oops, our bad” just doesn’t cover. Far too many assumptions have been passed on as proven truths for far too long and we can’t pretend that there hasn’t been some serious harm done as a result.
But if the “facts” aren’t even facts anymore then what else is left?
Nothing.
Or everything.
Depends on how you look at it.
Deciding none of it matters and we can believe whatever we want because we make our own reality doesn't work either because it can lead to delusion and stop people from getting health for real mental issues.
So we do need at least some kind of discernment, a way to strike a balance between doubting it all and accepting it all without question.
Some choice is still required, so how do you choose?
For now at least, we can trust most of our physical reality, so you begin with yourself. Your own senses. What you can taste, what you can touch, what you can smell, what you can feel.
Yes, your heart actually is beating.
So is the Earth’s.
That’s why they tell people to go touch grass when they’re getting off balance.
Grounding is a thing, and it has nothing to do with having a flight cancelled or being stuck in your room on a Friday night.
Connecting with the natural world does help us recalibrate our senses, including our sense of self, and walking barefoot on raw earth can help with that. So can the ocean, the stars at night, feeling a breeze, or the warmth of the sun on your skin.
So if you can’t tell what’s real anymore, start there.
The rest will sort itself out.
Just maybe avoid the salad bar in the meantime.
Image Credit:
photo by CostaPPPR
courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
Note: the specific lettuce in this photograph is not in any way associated with the Cyclospora outbreak of July 2026