A good Doctor warned me that I was at risk of coming down with a horrible case of callosity. It sounded so awful I ran to look up its symptoms and outcome.  Just as I feared, the good Doctor was right.  I was at risk. You could be at risk too.

I discovered that callosity is the condition of being hardened, calloused, unfeeling.  After listening to the news, reading article after article exposing our inhumanity towards one another, including family, friends and strangers, the stories can overwhelm my heart and crush sensitivity, so much so, that the heart risks losing awareness of its own hardness. With so much hurt in the world, it becomes tempting to withdraw into a shell for the sake of self-preservation, for the ability simply to fall asleep without succumbing to night-terrors. The better response seems to be to shut out all such news or to armor, medicate and distract oneself  because active caring and actual engagement for the sake of others can bring such suffering too close for comfort and comprehension.