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Part of living in the Internet age is having instant access to everything, all the time.

The latest news, your beloved friend 3000 miles away, the current weather in Dubai, your bank balance up to the minute, YouTube videos of your favourite childhood TV show, the song you heard on the radio this morning.

If you’re an information sponge like me, it’s easy to keep soaking up all the stimuli until you’re so full that if anything touches you, everything else you took in comes flowing back out in a muddy, jumbled mess.

I have so much to say, but no coherent way of saying any of it. Not because I don’t know what I think, and not because I don’t know how to write, but because my thoughts come together chaotically, more Pollack than Mondrian.

How does anyone make sense of this freaky world?

Still, my degree beat it into my head that I should build arguments from a single statement, and then frame my evidence around that central point — anything else would result in a cringing grade or acres of red pen scrawling “Relevance?”

Old habits die hard.

So here is the statement: Our only hope is softness.

Which sounds like madness, given that we’ve been taught to depend on hardness.

Steel frames hold up skyscrapers. Waves smash jagged cliffs that only give way in millimetres over time. Diamonds cut glass. Solid pavement skims underneath ton-heavy vehicles. Firm muscles keep us moving efficiently. Hard covers protect the pages of books. Calluses mark our heels.

Hard is safe, hard is protective, hard is stable, hard is powerful.

The victor is the one whose armor does not fail.

But soft is where we begin.

Suspended in warm fluid until we’re laid in our mothers’ arms, clothed in cotton to shield smooth new skin, kept religiously from edges that might cut.

We are carried and buffered and soothed until we are ready to be hard. To put on shoes with clacking soles. To fall down and get back up.

Then we put soft to the side and reserve it for touch, for the places we sleep, for the things closest to our bodies.

For anything else, though, hard is the rule. Hard is what will keep us alive. Hard is reality.

But do you ever feel like hard is all you ever get to be anymore? That you’ve lost any hope of soft?

When I see images of war, images of murder, images of hate, images of ignorance, images of suspicion — images of pure evil — my first response is a sort of fire up my spine and behind my eyes… a fire that melts me to liquid.

But then, like forged metal, I am thrust into ice cold water and made to firm up again, to move on, to do what I need to do to get through my day. After all, if I let myself soften for too long, there’s always a possibility that I won’t be able to solidify again.

And then what would happen?

I never find out.

I get it together and that’s that.

But the softness nags at me. I crave the warmth of feeling something that isn’t self-protection, that isn’t rational, that isn’t “coping.”

I know that feeling is born of love. I know that feeling means I can still be shocked. I know that feeling means I still believe in something other than nightmares. I know that feeling is what I need to reach for if I am ever going to do anything but look at the images and wait for the tears to sink back into my eyes.

I just equate it with weakness too much of the time, and then I don’t give in.

You have to toughen up to protect. You have to stay hard enough to shield yourself from anything that might come your way. You have to be strong to get anywhere or get anything done, right?

But that’s where my argument falls apart.

Because strong and hard are not the same thing.

Softness can be elasticity, too: the ability to bend and not break, to stretch as far as you need to go.

It can be insulation that keeps coldness from penetrating to the core.

It can be a shock absorbing surface that takes hit after hit after hit and yet stays pliable to protect.

And that’s what I want to become.

I don’t want to look away from things that are horrible because they make me want to break inside. I want to look and figure out how to help or how to move forward or what to do.

I don’t want to make excuses about acting or not acting because something is dire or far away or long-term or perpetual. I want to figure out big ways and small ways to do something anyway, even if it ends up being annoying or awkward or right on the edge of hopeless.

I don’t want to reduce lives to numbers and risk-reward ratios and “collateral damage.” I want to believe that helping one person is enough reason to wade into the fray.

I don’t want to forget how to grieve because I believe I might forget how to care at the same time.

Softness is always going to feel like a risk.

Elastics snap. Insulation develops holes. Shock absorbers have their limits.

The shit just keeps coming and keeps coming and there are a million or billion things wrong with our world at any given point. Not to mention the thousand and two things that are roiling around inside of my own soul, threatening to pull me under if I dive in.

I don’t know how to fix most of it. Any of it, at times. I feel helpless more often than I can express.

But I have come to the terrifying and beautiful conclusion that this world is due my softness.

And that’s what it will get until I’m gone.