are we allowed to dream when the world's on fire?

and other things I'm asking myself on a Sunday morning

Are we allowed to have creative dreams when the world is burning?

“Look,” my friend Savannah (

Untangled by Savannah Locke

) shows me a leather journal she got on a recent trip to Italy, “This journal company was started in Italy, during WWII.” On the leather binding is printed “Founded in 1944”.

Imagine starting a small company in the midst of fascist Italy? Perhaps a weird thing to feel comforted by, yet I find the mundanity of it soothing.

I find stories about people living during the Great Depression comforting these days too. About how women started tailoring enterprises to reuse clothing, or started furniture companies that created hundreds of jobs.

I also love that Eleanor Roosevelt had a daily column called My Day. It was essentially what we’d now recognize as a blog, and it ran for 30 years, chronicling everything from important state dinners, to what she had for breakfast, to who made the dress she wore to tea with at a university speaking engagement. It was wildly popular, with four million readers, and she wrote it every day until weeks before her death.

Of course, people complained about filling her column “with inane chatter about your family affairs— words, words, words, which are…only once in a blue moon of any value whatsoever. Why do you consider those things interesting to intelligent people just because you happen to be the President’s wife? Why waste your valuable time and the space in the paper… when you could so easily write something which might have marvelous results for the betterment of the world?”¹

I find it comforting that people found ways to criticize arguably one of the most humanitarian First Ladies in our nation’s history, whose compassion helped house thousands, built towns for families ravaged by the Depression, convinced her wealthy friends to fund schools, hospitals, and did much in Washington to champion the early beginnings of the Civil Rights movement.

I love that in the midst of Nazis and fascists and war, Salvador Dali and his contemporaries were starting the Surrealist art movement. That Bing Crosby released White Christmas and I’ll Be Home for Christmas, because people still needed songs to listen to while they decorated the tree even as the world was being bombed.

The last five years in particular, the dissonance of “carrying on with normal life” in the face of global horror and tragedy has been enough to throw many of us into a crisis of mental health.

We’re currently living through a chaotic and revolutionary time in history, and don’t know how this story is going to end. Is it okay that I’m still making breakfast and planning birthday parties? Is it okay that I’m writing this stupid, little Substack or watching movies?

Instead of answering these questions head on (mostly because I don’t have the answers), I’m finding it normalizing to realize that even during the horrors of WWII, people fought, protested, died, mourned, and also took baths, read poetry, made art, and fell in love like they always have.

Maybe there isn’t a neat answer to daily living in these times.

Agatha Christie wrote and published several of her books during WWII.

According to LitHub, “The 1940s was the most intensely literary decade in American history.”

While it’s never right to normalize or stop fighting injustice and oppression, maybe it is okay to normalize the inevitability of encountering pain? Whatever that looks like.

Who are we to think we’re to emerge unscathed by the horrors of life? Or to believe we’re better than any other generation to live through tragedy and uncertainty?

My temptation is to not rest until I’m comfortable, but maybe life is more about recognizing part of living is never giving up the fight— while also buying groceries?

Maybe it’s speaking out for justice, while also writing silly little blog posts?

Maybe it’s looking for ways to support others, while also taking a chance on your creative dreams?

Maybe life has never been on hold, and will never be on hold, not in the grand scheme of things anyway.

I don’t have answers to any of this really. But I wanted to share what’s been helping my daily state of mind as I live in the cognitive dissonance of 2025.

1

Excerpt from Eleanor and Hick: The Love Affair That Shaped a First Lady by Susan Quinn.