How to care about things (without being overwhelmed)

In one of the many film retellings of the classic story of Cinderella, Ever After, the formerly apathetic, self-centered, and purposeless prince says, "I used to think, if I cared about anything, I'd have to care about everything, and I'd go stark raving mad!" So he chose instead, for years, to care about nothing.

I wonder if that's how most Americans are today. We are constantly presented with so many causes and needs - with starving refugees in Africa, sex slavery in Southeast Asia, human rights abuses in China, environmentally destructive practices in the US, and countless natural disasters like the earthquake in Haiti or Hurricane Sandy in New York, not to mention the myriad of social and political issues on both sides of the worldview split. The sheer quantity and magnitude of the problems overwhelms us, and so we bury our heads in the sand and seek our own personal happiness while closing our eyes and ears to the needs all around us. Now, it makes sense that we feel overwhelmed. There really are more problems (and problems of larger scope) than we could ever hope to fully address with our limited time, skills, and resources - and how could we ever hope even to figure out which problem most deserves the time and resources we could give it? If we help to rehabilitate former prisoners in our local communities, do we need to feel guilty that we are not also helping to train and restore former sex slaves in Thailand? If we donate to food programs in refugee camps around the world, do we need to feel guilty that we are not donating to our local food banks? It's not difficult to picture ourselves suddenly snapping from the weight of it all and, in the words of the aforementioned prince, going "stark raving mad!"

But this madness is not by any means a necessary or unavoidable consequence of beginning to care about one problem or another. We just need to give ourselves the permission to accept our limitations and the command to work within them to best of our abilities. Acknowledging that we are fallible and limited simply by nature of being human allows us to truly care about one specific problem - and devote ourselves to its correction - without feeling guilty about all the other problems we don't have the time or skills to adequately handle. And once we truly care about something, it will be a joy, a source of meaning and purpose, to throw ourselves towards its resolution. I think all the half-hearted efforts we make in life stem from the absence of this genuine concern about the problem and the concomitant desire to see it resolved; that they are, in essence, the output of a guilty conscience prodding an apathetic will into temporary action. But if we let ourselves deeply and genuinely care about one or two problems (that we are capable of acting upon in tangible, relevant ways), and allow ourselves to dispense with guilt about all the other hundreds of problems in the world, we can start to act with our whole hearts, with a motivated will, and with real purpose.

And I have a suspicion that we just might find our capacity for caring and acting increased as we go about the process of living with purpose instead of apathy, until we have touched more lives and brought about more good than we ever imagined possible.