It’s easy to get tugged off course. But I want to hold in mind what matters to me even as I’m engaged in the daily bustle. I want to be more conscious about the choices I make. Today I’m thinking about refugees held in horrific conditions in Libya. I know about this because reporters took time to research and took risks to provide a window into a brutal reality. The New Yorker published “The Secretive Prisons” last week. I’m grateful for this effort. It reminds me, once again, why journalists matter.

And that brings me to poet John Donne’s thoughts about human connection:

“No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a promontory were, as well as if a manor of thy friend’s or of thine own were; any man’s death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.“

Awareness first.