In the midst of a holiday season, when giving thanks and giving gifts focus our thoughts, how do we walk upright, maintaining a semblance of balance, through a decidedly broken world? It’s been a question for me ever since my personal world was broken at about the same time our country was convulsed by the Vietnam War and the “generation gap.”

The childhood admonition to eat everything on your plate was accompanied by the reminder that “There are children starving in Africa,” a statement still true today. I was haunted by photos from Africa and others in Life magazine documenting American poverty in Appalachia. Many showed children with no glimmer of hope in their eyes.

Later, I asked questions: How could I enjoy regular meals when others in the world faced starvation. By extension, how could I enjoy the exhilaration of physical games and competition when afflictions left others unable to run or even walk? How could I revel in my right to free speech when others had to suffer in silence or be arrested, even killed, for speaking the wrong words?

Some of my contemporaries took up meditation before it was widely recognized as a healthy habit. Others dived into the vortex of drug use that limited the recognition of problems outside of a short radius. Still others were content with a simple shrug, essentially saying, “It’s not my problem.”

Today’s problems challenge us through the juxtaposition of extremes: wealth and poverty, good and evil, love and hate. It’s hard to swallow the insanities around us without choking: senseless mass shootings; government-sanctioned mass murder in international wars; a threatened and changing environment; a barely functioning American democracy facing even greater threats in the coming year; a worldwide economic system built on the backs of the working poor while heaping unimaginable riches on only a few; family and friends felled by accidents, addictions, illness, and old age.

I’m sure you don’t need me to emphasize the problems we face. Americans and people worldwide are clearly showing the signs of too much stress through dramatic increases in anxiety and depression, and suicide rates for young people, especially since COVID killed millions and isolated the rest of us. We are currently an unbalanced nation and world, our paths rocky and torturous, without a road map in sight.

And yet ... the miracles keep happening, through the brave and selfless actions of “ordinary” people helping others, and the majestic resilience of our natural world. (I was surprised some years ago when I interviewed top physicists and other scientists at UMass Amherst and so many affirmed a strong belief in God because our bodies and the delicate balances of our environment were much too complicated to have happened by chance.) But accepting this dichotomy — the existence within our world of great good and great evil — requires conscious effort and good mental habits.

I’ve always searched for some type of personal balance that admits the outrageous imperfections of this world — accepting that our God or other deity is not always benevolent — while embracing its wonders. Recently, on the internet, I found a quotation that speaks directly to this puzzle, and frames an answer that I can embrace.

“The work of the mature person is to carry grief in one hand and gratitude in the other and to be stretched large by them. How much sorrow can I hold? That’s how much gratitude I can give. If I carry only grief, I’ll bend toward cynicism and despair. If I have only gratitude, I’ll become saccharine and won’t develop much compassion for other people’s suffering. Grief keeps the heart fluid and soft, which helps make compassion possible.” Francis Ward Weller

I’m not familiar enough with Weller’s work to be counted as a follower, and I’m unsure of the math that specifically equates the depths of grief and gratitude in each person, but overall, the quotation rings true for me. If our paths are rocky in the face of another crisis, we may bend one way or the other, feeling the grief that is constant through human history, or focusing on positives that allow us to serve as a pebble thrown in the pond, creating ripples of good feeling around us.

It’s unrealistic to expect grief to disappear from our personal and political lives. But gratitude for our blessings — from the brilliant smile on a child’s face to a temporary military cease-fire — can help keep us upright in what is often a cruel and chaotic world.

Allen Woods is a freelance writer, author of the Revolutionary-era historical fiction novel “The Sword and Scabbard,” and Greenfield resident. His column appears regularly on Saturdays. Comments are welcome here or at awoods2846@gmail.com.