When everything is going nicely for us, it’s very easy to ignore Politics.

I’ve been interested in the subject, to a varying extent, most of my life, but it has never been a matter of life or death to me. It’s never been something that very much affects me personally in fact.

And it still doesn’t. The mental health issues I was dealing with for a number of years, and occasionally still do, which though very real, were far more influenced by my own brain patterns, upbringing and personal relationships, than by anything happening in a political framework.

At the moment though, it seems that Politics, on a world wide scale, is gradually moving closer to home, in a not dissimilar way to the lead up to the Second World war last century. Not that that kind of war is imminent. But there seem to be a lot of factors - like the environment and the lack of care we have taken for it; like the channelling of money and power into fewer, and very specific hands; like the way in which race and sexuality issues are playing out in an uglier way again, when we might have thought they were on the way to being sorted; and like the divisive angry tribalism that seems to be growing, fuelled by mainstream and online media - which, when added all together, can look very much like a gathering storm. (And I would sadly acknowledge that for some folk that storm has already broken. I’ve been one of the lucky ones).

It all feels a little scary. Even from my fairly safe vantage point.

And I’m asking a question to myself.

What can I do? Or rather, what can I do better, because I have always wanted, and usually tried, to do something.

I don’t ask this out of a sense of false guilt, even though that kind of guilt is very much a part of my own mental heritage. I ask, because I don’t want to be a passive spectator.

Because doing a small something, is better than doing a big nothing.

And I don’t want to wait until the storm breaks over my own home either. Whether we like it or not, we are all living in a very political world right now.