I stopped reading the news.

I stopped checking Facebook. I asked my boyfriend to please stop with his near-constant updates of politics, shootings, mass casualty events. I can’t abide it anymore.

There’s too much sadness, too much madness, too much hatefulness for me to handle anymore. In a word, I am sad that kindness has been so neglected of late. Does anyone else feel this way? I’m not interested in preaching things about “loving thy neighbor”, in fact, I believe–as the reality of living in apartments in New York City has taught me–it’s completely acceptable to not love your neighbor at all. However, while not loving them, it’s still important to be decent to them.

Self-care is a thing now, do you guys know what that means? I just learned about it; you know that thing you do when you treat yourself to a donut, or maybe you spend another 10 minutes in the shower and just let the water stream down your face, or maybe it means you run and run and run. Whatever it means to you, it means you’ve taken a moment out of the world to take care of you. For me, it’s taking a nap, getting a pedicure, cooking. It’s kittens. And dogs. I’ve turned off all social media except for Instagram, where I seek out adorable videos of kittens losing their minds to the twitching of a string or dogs who practice CPR on their human handlers–the explore/discover feature has been really helpful in this endeavor. I try to get lost in these adorable feeds when things start to get me down. Recently, I started following a Great Dane named Kernel. His owner calls him “a clumsy lap cow”, which is all you really need to know, and while I watch his antics (no, for real, antics; this is a word I never use) I can ignore how truly frightening the world is becoming. I think that’s why Lil Bub, and Doug the Pug, and Juniper the Happiest Fox have enough followers to rival even the most popular of Kardashians (ugh, I don’t follow them). They make people happy.

Back in the day, pre-Instagram and Facebook, pre-cellphone, even, one of my all-time favorites, Keith Haring, was decorating New York with images of glowing babies and dancing dogs, friends holding hands and high-kicking and mothers holding babies, alien spaceships and hearts. So very many hearts. Haring was an artist who staunchly believed in making artwork accessible to everyone. He didn’t reserve his work for the ultra-rarefied world of the super wealthy, but also for children whose help he enlisted to paint murals and for whom he hosted art-making workshops. Haring recognized the power of these simplified images as a vehicle for happiness. Before I was using puppies on the internet as a serotonin-lift, he was leaving them on street corners and in subway stations in an attempt to completely subvert the traditional means of viewing artwork. Haring made an effort to create images that were simple and powerful at the same time, images which would mean something to any viewer, no matter the language they spoke or the lives they led–it was a phenomenon, a powerful phenomenon that gave the whole world entry to a museum or to a gallery through which they already had spent their entire lives moving.

The impulse to seek out what makes one happy isn’t a new development. Human beings are predisposed toward happiness. The only thing that’s changed is the means by which we access those things. Keith Haring painted murals and drew on subway advertisements, we use the internet and instagram.

If you happen to be in Japan, Haring has a show up at the Nakamura Collection in Kobuchizawa, for another two months. If you’re in New York, like I am, you can see his mural, Crack is Whack, along the FDR and in Harlem River Park where its lived since he painted it in 1986. For more info always, check out his foundation HERE.