SideStack: Making Art While the World Is on Fire

Bondi Beach, Brown University, and the weight of attention

Today I felt it again.

That tightening in the chest that comes when the world reminds you, violently, that it is not safe. That suffering is not theoretical. That people die senselessly while the rest of us wake up, make coffee, and try to stay on task.

The shootings in Bondi and at Brown University hit me hard. Not because tragedy is rare, but because someone pointed a light at these moments and said, look here. Pay attention to this grief.

And when the spotlight hits, the weight follows.

What I struggle with, quietly and often, is the guilt that surfaces around my creative efforts when the world feels like it is actively coming apart. I sit with scripts, ideas, tone, pacing, while somewhere else lives are ending abruptly, violently, without meaning or resolution.

In those moments, I feel self centered. Not selfish in the way we usually mean it, but insulated. Protected by distance, by focus, by the privilege of being able to look away and continue.

The harder truth is this.
There is no shortage of suffering.

There is death, rape, murder, starvation, and displacement happening every day, everywhere, whether we are looking at it or not. What changes is not the volume of pain, but where attention lands. The spotlight does not create tragedy. It selects it.

And still, the selected grief hits harder.

I think this is because attention forces proximity. It collapses distance. It removes the illusion that horror is abstract or far away. When a name, a place, a photo enters the frame, the mind can no longer protect itself with generalization.

This is where I feel like one of the violinists on the Titanic.

Still playing. Still shaping something delicate. Still believing in beauty, structure, rhythm, while the ship is very clearly taking on water.

So the question becomes unavoidable.
How do I maintain enthusiasm and flame in tandem with such atrocities.
What is the role of the self designated artist in a world that is visibly burning.

I do not believe the answer is to stop creating. Silence does not stop violence. Withdrawal does not honor the dead. And guilt alone has never healed anyone.

But I also do not believe the answer is blind optimism or creative denial.

Maybe the role of the artist is not to compete with tragedy or explain it. Maybe it is to stay human in the presence of it. To refuse numbness. To refuse indifference. To continue shaping meaning even when meaning feels fragile.

Art does not fix the world. That is too much to ask of it. But it can remind us that interior life still exists. That reflection still matters. That attention can be directed toward something other than fear without disrespecting the pain that surrounds us.

The violinists on the Titanic were not ignorant. They were not mocking reality. They were responding to it with the only language they had.

Sometimes creation is not celebration. Sometimes it is witness. Sometimes it is resistance against despair. Sometimes it is simply a refusal to let horror be the only voice in the room.

I do not have clean answers here. I am sitting inside the contradiction. Grieving people I never knew. Feeling the weight of the world I cannot carry. Trying to justify the quiet act of making something while everything feels loud and broken.

But I know this.
Losing the flame does not help the suffering.
Letting the world extinguish curiosity, care, and expression only hands it more ground.

So I keep playing. Carefully. Imperfectly. With awareness.
Not because it saves the ship.
But because it reminds me why it matters that we are on it together.

From Day One is not about ignoring reality.
It is about staying awake inside it.