*Takes a deep breath*

*Lets it out*

*Takes another one, just for good measure*

Okay. It’s going to be okay.

I was wound up like a demonic clockwork drummer boy when I posted a few days ago. I’m not going to apologize for it, but I am going to temper it a little bit. Because we’ve just had one of those terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad days that your mother warned you about. Much worse than that, in fact.

A nightclub was shot up, and people were killed. Too many people, to be sure (though to be fair, any more than zero is too many). That’s a lot of funerals. A lot of mourning family and friends. A lot of very upset sympathizers.

And the internet devolved, as the internet does, into the usual black-and-white, allows-for-no-nuance trench warfare of ad hominems and righteous principled generalizations and laments for humanity and all the rest of it. And I was guilty of my share of it.

But every day is a chance to start anew, and you can change your entire experience if you just change the way you think a little bit.

I woke up early. I went for a run. I watched the kids play on the beach.

I came back to the news to see that while, yeah, all that black-and-white yelling-and-not-listening crap was going on, there was some good springing up between the cracks in the pavement, too. Lines around the block to donate blood. Millions of dollars raised for the families of the victims. The sun, in fact, still rises.

There’s a pattern around crises like these: outrage, arguing, acceptance, then indifference. One wonders when the cycle will break, as surely it must. The outrage over this incident seems particularly high. Maybe this time will be the time that actually brings about some change.

Or maybe not.

My local newspaper posted a picture of a rainbow sighted over Pulse in Orlando yesterday. Of course, a lot of people were quick to assume meaning where there is none: It’s a sign that everything’s going to be all right! God is good! After rain come rainbows! And if that brings comfort to them, that’s great.

Of course, a rainbow is simply an artifact of light refraction and perspective. That it appeared over Pulse is a symbol of nothing other than the fact that nature continues to operate just fine, regardless of human actions. And that’s the meaning I’d rather take away.

There will always be tragedies. We might learn from them; we might not. There will still be rainbows. The sun will still rise.