World On Fire

Table of Contents

I must confess that I am finding it harder than usual to focus on my work today. For those of you who don’t know, my home province of Manitoba is facing an unprecedented outbreak of hundreds of wildfires across its vast northern and eastern forests, leading to a human evacuation on a scale not seen since the Great Red River Flood of 1997.

An article from yesterday’s Globe and Mail newspaper summarizes the gravity of the situation:

Manitoba Premier Wab Kinew has declared a state of emergency for at least 30 days, as multiple wildfires are spreading across vast parts of the entire province, forcing more than 17,000 people to evacuate their homes.
The province has called upon the Canadian Armed Forces to fly residents from several northern communities toward safer areas, Mr. Kinew said Wednesday evening, just hours after seeking the military assistance from Prime Minister Mark Carney. The majority of those people will be temporarily housed in Winnipeg, where soccer fields and arenas are being readied to become large-scale evacuation centres.
“This is the largest evacuation Manitoba will have seen in most people’s living memory,” Mr. Kinew told reporters at the provincial legislature, as cellphones chimed loudly with emergency alerts. “For the first time, it’s not a fire in one region. We have fires in every region.”
An evacuation order has been issued for the mining city of Flin Flon, more than 820 kilometres north of Winnipeg, where roughly 5,000 people live along the Manitoba-Saskatchewan border.
Slightly west, along the shores of the Nelson River, the Northern communities of Pimicikamak Cree Nation, Cross Lake, Norway House and Mathias Colomb First Nation in Pukatawagan near the Pas are also being mandated to vacate by Thursday.
Meanwhile, the province is advising residents in eastern Manitoba to remain prepared for further evacuations with emergency kits and car fuel, as a roughly 31,200-hectare fire remains out of control along the border with Ontario.

As of today, these spring wildfires spreading across eastern and northern Manitoba are among the most devastating my province has seen in decades. Over a hundred fires have consumed nearly 4,000 square kilometres of forest, an area approaching ten times the size of Winnipeg, where emergency shelters have been set up in several hockey arenas and an indoor soccer complex to house the evacuees.

It is hard for me, to go about my regular workday, when so many of my fellow Manitobans are hurriedly packing up their lives and families and flying or driving south to the safety of Winnipeg, not knowing when or if they are ever going to see their homes again. Coming so hard on the heels of the shocks imposed upon Canadians by the wrenching and worrying changes in its relationship with its largest trading partner, the United States, and I must confess that I am feeling, at times, stressed out and overwhelmed. Toss into the mix a recent home computer crash, plus a serious tax mistake made by my former financial planner for which I am, over one year later, still waiting for a favourable resolution from my bank. And so on and so forth. I know that I am still a very fortunate man compared to many people who live on this planet, but still, it’s been a lot to deal with. And, at times, I have failed to deal with it well.

One of the lessons I have taken from the stressful situations over the past year is that I need to more clearly differentiate between what I have control over and what I don’t, and focusing on the former rather than wasting time and energy on the latter. This also means that, at times, I have chosen to step away from the little social media that I still do consume (mostly Reddit, which I peruse anonymously), as well as to deliberately avoid reading the news media, in order to preserve my mental and emotional health.

For example, during the first few months of the absolute batshit craziness emanating from Donald Trump’s second term as president (over which I had zero control, except to change my shopping habits), I assiduously avoided the mainstream news media by spending my evenings and weekends intently focused on cleaning through and reorganizing the voluminous inventory of my main Second Life avatar, Vanity Fair. And I full well realize what I was doing: investing time and energy into something that I could control, rather than fall further into a depressive, anxious spiral over so many other things that I had little-to-no control over. Such is the benefit of an all-encompassing hobby!

Find your little niche, your little happy space, and build a safe haven there for when you need to do something to protect your mental state from the chaos, craziness, brutality, and heartbreak of the real world. Even if you can only get away to it for half an hour or a couple of hours at a time, the flow state you enter while pursuing your obsessive little hobby gives your brain a chance to escape the hamster-wheel of worry. Interestingly (well, at least, interesting to me) is that I also find I get into this state when I am composing a blog post such as this one!

Anyways, back to the original point of this blogpost: my world is currently on fire, both figuratively and literally. It’s going to be a long, hot summer. I still haven’t made any decisions about what I am going to do with this blog (no change there), but I probably will still post every so often, just to let you all know I’m still here. And—if you do believe—please say a prayer for us besieged Manitobans. Thanks.