When you need a dose of sanity, pan in. When you need to find reason, logic, and design, pan out. I’ll explain, but that’s the TL/DR version.

If that’s all the time you have, stop there and have a good day.

My column can be a challenge. It’s not for dumb people – I think we’ve established that. But by the number of you who stop me on the street or in restaurants and tell me you read every column, I think if we can grow the readership by one or two people a month – someday we’ll have something.

I know that reading is hard, and I want to make this as easy for you as possible. This world is hard enough without some writer making us struggle-bus through a wannabe literary local column. I’ll try not to use too many big words or historical or literary or cultural allusions. *Dangit, I already used “allusions” and I’m just getting started. I feel like William F. Buckley making a sarcastic joke on Firing Line and then side-eyeing the camera to see if anyone got it.

*Dangit. Ok, let me start over.

This is a weird time to be alive, and I say that because I’ve studied history and literature for my whole life and… well… this is a weird time. If you could zap back through time to the foundations of creation and God was letting you pick a brief window of time when you could be alive as an observer of history, this one would be a doozy. Up is down. Everything has just gone off the rails. You can’t even make up something completely fictional and wild for a book, because it is all actually happening in real time. Reality is stranger than fiction. Insanity and Mental Illness are not only normalized but are now merely categories of preferred people groups. Every whacked-out conspiracy theory is proven true at ever-increasing speeds. A guy had a whole island for rich pedophiles, and we’re arresting grandmas at school board meetings and grandpas who say mean things on the Internet. They are 3D printing artificial meat, but raw milk right from a cow is still illegal in most places.

I could go on, but I won’t. Let’s get to my advice.

When it seems like the world has gone insane (because it has,) it can all become very overwhelming. Panic-inducing. What helps me, when I realize that nothing is “normal” anymore, and the new normal is abject craziness and degeneracy… I pan in. That is to say, I stop looking at the world broadly, and I focus on the things close to me. Clear the mechanism. I open my eyes and concentrate on the things in my field of view. My wife. My neighbor. The conversation I am having with a friend. I text someone who has interests similar to mine. I check in on a friend. We walk to a local shop and breathe in a dose of “things are ok, right here and right now.” So… When the world is crazy and you need a dose of sanity, pan in.

But there’s another lesson here.

Sometimes, you need to get your bearings, to map your direction and trajectory, and to see your place in the larger scope of time and history. You need to see that – on a larger scale, even amid chaos – there is reason, logic, and design in the universe. When you need landmarks, pan out.

I like to watch a sunset or a sunrise and know that we can know when they’ll happen to the hour and the minute. I like to see that most things, even human folly, can be predictable if you know how scripts are written.

I like to read my bible and get a grasp of the plan of history. I get comfort when I (through over 50 years of paying attention,) see that regardless of how bad things are, there appears to be a plan for it all. I like to see the cosmic perfection of creation, the precise timepiece that is the world and the heavens and the universe. I like to see that even the bad things are predictable outcomes of bad ideas and the distillation of human depravity. People say, “How did you know that these things would happen, and how did you write about them years in advance?”

I just pan out. You can see where things are going if you can pan out and see the route and trajectory and speed, etc.

There is panic when you think that you are on a rock with crazy people speeding through the chaos of a mindless universe – but that’s not even remotely true. There is a lot more order here than most people imagine, and you can see it if you pan out.

Both of these tools: Panning in, and panning out, can be valuable in maintaining your sanity in a world where insanity is now the norm.

I hope you all have a great day.

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays on the website.