Hello and welcome to Being Well, I'm Forest Hanson.

If you're new to the podcast, thanks for taking the time to join us today.

And if you've listened before, welcome back.

The tone of this episode is probably going to be a bit different today.

For context, we're recording this on February 28th and on February 24th, as you almost

just certainly already know, Russia invaded Ukraine and the largest military operation

in Europe since World War Two.

I'd like to start just by saying that our hearts go out to the people of Ukraine and I

hope that as many people involved in this conflict as possible are able to stay safe.

And I think that like many people, we wish there were more we could do.

It's hard to feel anything other than a bit helpless here.

We're seeing this conflict back here in the United States, play out over our screens,

we're filled with sympathy and empathy for the people who are directly experiencing it.

And then alongside the helplessness, there's no small measure of anxiety just speaking

personally for ourselves, for how this could potentially cascade over time into larger

conflicts and the potential implications of that.

This is a crisis and a tragedy and it's also just the latest in the long line of events

stretching back to the virtual dawn of human civilization where regular people who've

done nothing wrong suffer immensely as the strong use them as ponds in this great struggle

for power, this enormous game of chess and it's incredibly easy for that to make everyone

feel extremely small and for it all to feel profoundly deeply unfair.

And it feels like we've had just more than our own fair share of crisis and tragedy over

...