Has anyone has ever noticed a person’s face eating an ice cream cone? Pure bliss and happiness with each lick. Ice cream makes everyone happy, but there is something different about ice cream in a cone.

Whether or not one realizes it, eating an ice cream cone is a study in contradiction. Despite the enormous pleasure a good ice cream cone can bring, and I’ve yet to meet a bad one, it comes with certain challenges.

The greatest of these is to ensure the ice cream doesn’t fall out of the cone. It’s a balancing act of sorts but the prize is well worth the effort.

Even eating an Oreo cookie presents scrutiny. Should you eat both sides at once, break it open and lick the middle or eat both sides separately trying to balance the amount of filling on each half? Yes, I know everything I seem to relate to starts with food.

So how do we make certain our precious scoop or scoops are protected from landing on the curb? Or eat an Oreo?

Okay, here’s the real point I’m making…in every moment of pleasure there is risk. Most of the time we just “got this,” without focusing too much. Choices must be made to ensure the best reward.

Yet why is it that the risks these days seem out of balance with the rewards? Something is off kilter and we are walking sideways.

Even something as simple as licking an ice cream cone must be done with care to ensure against loss. While we’re enjoying our treat, we don’t realize we’re being challenged unless we look down and ice cream is covering our shoe. Yet now we are suddenly aware we are teetering with cones or cookies.

Are we really aware of this delicate balance as we live our lives each day? Often dwelling too long in the mundane tasks that fill up our moments and became a part of who and what we are.

The things we’ve come to depend on for consistency, but truly mean very little to our well-being.

Reading the morning paper, sorting through laundry, making a grocery list no one sticks to anyway or playing Wordle. These aren’t earth shattering events in our day, but they give us a sense of continuity and a certain harmony.

We aren’t aware how much we need these habits until we find our world disrupted. Perhaps this is where the true challenge for human beings takes on a life of its own.

Despite our feelings of security, we are not. Yet this is something we all have learned to tune out, to ignore and lock away. We must or our entire day would be spent in fear and anxiety.

We need to feel whole and in control. The fact that one little shift in gravity would mean the entire world being destroyed doesn’t enter our mind. We won’t allow that to happen because we have set up a perimeter and bad thoughts aren’t allowed inside. The crime tape border of our well-being.

We are so certain the earth will continue on an even keel the fact it could spin out of control is irrelevant because “we got this.”

Yet suddenly we humans are facing a new challenge. One that is not so easy to ignore and is making us a bit antsy. We are a bit off kilter these days and searching for our sense of equilibrium.

Oh we fight that feeling every day and tell ourselves, I’ve got this, but inside we’re feeling off somehow.

Where our usual grasp on life was steady and in double digits it seems to be slipping and something is there deep in the pit of our stomach where foreboding lives.

So how do we handle the fact our steps seem wobbly and not feeling as safe or sure on our feet?

How do we convince ourselves it will all turn out fine, so we can go back to reading our paper and sorting laundry as though it mattered?

We humans don’t do well when faced with danger or life is lopsided. We’re not hyenas galloping through the Serengeti Plains in Africa, unaware we are about to become a dinner entrée for some lion. We’re a higher life form, we have a brain, well most of us anyway. Despite having the brains, sadly we don’t always choose to use them.

It is precisely when intelligence and logic is lacking and absent from our lives that we feel the most off balance. Suddenly nothing makes sense any longer and a weird feeling in our gut registers, “Danger Will Robinson.” So if Robbie the Robot is warning us, what do we do?

Despite all of our best coping mechanisms a strange sensation remains and it’s left to us to discern the solution. We know something is off, we just feel it.

After all this mumbo jumbo have I brought you here to offer no help? No, but I can’t be totally certain it will work.

For perhaps the first time in our lives our fight or flight mechanism is triggered all the time.

Flight is no solution for there is nowhere to run.

Now fight is the only way to get our balance back.

Let’s face it; we’re extremely bothered by the state of our nation and our world. Although we are only one person, in this we share a single goal. To restore order to our lives. To face what is confronting us every day and restore calm and harmony. We know life isn’t right, or the way it should be and we feel it continually.

We need to open ourselves to the reality of our situation and understand what is to be done.

As any psychiatrist will tell you, the first step toward healing is admitting there is a problem.

Facing that fact will help us get our power back.

It will force us to look for answers, seek out others who feel as we do, take the risks we must to restore our equilibrium.

Abraham Lincoln famously said, “You can fool all of the people some of the time, and some of the people all of the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time.”

We are not fooled by those who would disrupt and corrupt our world. We see them, we know them. How we stop them is the real question. We are only one person against a hostile world. How do we walk straight again? Sure, this time it’s trickier, but in the end it’s imperative that we got this. And we will!

Perhaps while you’re pondering the answer a double scoop ice cream cone might help you think.