Do you ever want to escape reality? Well I do, and I'm sure that I'm not the only one. Every time I read the news, my stomach falls out, and when I look at my bank account, I don't feel any better. Should I give into the desire to run?

If you've been thinking about this question, or if it might be hanging out at the back of your mind, you're not alone. Unfortunately -- or maybe fortunately -- we can't run far before we bump into reality. OK, so you try to escape into a pristine area to get away from human consciousness, and you find empty beer bottles strewing the path. You try to escape into the intimacy of your relationship, and you find ego, power struggles and just general bad attitudes even in the sanctity of your own home or your own consciousness. Even trying to get away forces you onto a road where you might have to deal with other drivers.

So what do we do? I guess we have to just accept that reality is with us wherever we are, and that we actually feel better when we try to do something about it. I feel so ashamed of myself when I take no action to help other people, or animals or the planet, that it really isn't worth escaping. Each one of us can find something we can do, something we are good at, something we might actually even enjoy doing for the planet. And when we give, we start to feel way better about ourselves, just because we know we have done that something.