I've come to accept, even despite my instincts or tendencies to lament and sink into periodic despair, that living is not a rational thing. It must be irrational: Irrational optimism.

Generations before us and after us have experienced the end of the world, the end of their people, the end of their society and culture, through war, famine, disease, and death itself. We still lived on and echoes of the past have survived until those echoes became new things and new people.

Immortality of the species was always a fantasy, but we still have to try to exist and thrive. To strive for meaning, to imbue our lives with purpose and love. And seek to be part of a continuity of hope in that respect; the Christians would call it resurrection.

Like the prophet Jeremiah, who saw the destruction of Jerusalem and Judea by Babylon, who still saw hope and life for the Jewish people after its apparent annihilation by Babyllon, we must have faith that we will overcome and see peace and survival become a reality.